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Title: Men Who Have Made the Empire
Author: Griffith, George Chetwynd
Language: English
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MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE
* * * * * *
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
=VALDAR, THE OFT-BORN. A Saga of Seven Ages.= Imp.
16mo, cloth gilt. Illustrated by HAROLD PIFFARD.
Price 6s.
=THE VIRGIN OF THE SUN. A Tale of the Conquest of
Peru.= Crown 8vo, cloth. With Frontispiece by STANLEY
L. WOOD. Price 6s.
=KNAVES OF DIAMONDS. Being Tales of the Diamond
Fields.= Crown 8vo, cloth. Illustrated by E. F.
SHERIE. Price 3s. 6d.
LONDON
C. ARTHUR PEARSON LIMITED
* * * * * *
[Illustration: “ALMIGHTY GOD, OF THY GOODNESS, GIVE ME LIFE AND LEAVE
ONCE TO SAIL AN ENGLISH SHIP ON YONDER SEA!”
(_See page 54._) _Frontispiece._]
MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE
by
GEORGE GRIFFITH
Third Edition
London
C. Arthur Pearson Limited
Henrietta Street, W.C.
1899
To
THE GLORIOUS MEMORY
OF
THE MIGHTY DEAD
AND TO
THE HONOUR OF THE LIVING
WHO ARE
CARRYING ON THEIR NOBLE WORK,
THE FOLLOWING PAGES
ARE INSCRIBED.
“_Fair is our lot--O goodly is our heritage!
(Humble ye, my people, and be fearful in your mirth!)
For the Lord our God Most High
He hath made the deep as dry,
He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the earth!_”
A SONG OF THE ENGLISH
CONTENTS
I.
PAGE
WILLIAM THE NORMAN 1
II.
EDWARD OF THE LONG LEGS 21
III.
THE QUEEN’S LITTLE PIRATE 39
IV.
OLIVER CROMWELL 71
V.
WILLIAM OF ORANGE 97
VI.
JAMES COOK 119
VII.
LORD CLIVE 143
VIII.
WARREN HASTINGS 169
IX.
NELSON 193
X.
WELLINGTON 223
XI.
“CHINESE GORDON” 249
XII.
CECIL RHODES 279
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
BY STANLEY L. WOOD
“ALMIGHTY GOD, OF THY GOODNESS, GIVE ME LIFE AND
LEAVE ONCE TO SAIL AN ENGLISH SHIP ON YONDER
SEA!” _Frontispiece_
_Facing p._
HE DROVE THE GOOD STEEL THROUGH MAIL AND FLESH AND BONE 10
DUKE WILLIAM ROARED OUT THAT HE WAS ALIVE 17
EDWARD GRIPPED THE WOULD-BE MURDERER 30
THEY CARRIED HIM DOWN TO THE BOATS 53
HE SWOOPED WITH HIS CAVALRY ROUND THE REAR OF THE KING’S ARMY 83
HE HALTED HIS ARMY ... AND SANG THE HUNDRED AND SEVENTEENTH
PSALM 94
MADE HIM REEL IN HIS SADDLE 112
“MEN OF ENNISKILLEN, WHAT WILL YOU DO FOR ME?” HE CRIED 113
MISSED HIM AND KILLED ANOTHER MAN BEHIND HIM 141
INSTEAD OF CHARGING THEY TURNED ROUND AND MADE LANES THROUGH
THE ARMY BEHIND THEM 158
HIS ENEMY WENT DOWN WITH A BULLET IN THE RIGHT SIDE 185
NELSON AT COPENHAGEN 214
THE ORDER THAT SENT THE BRITISH LINE STREAMING DOWN FROM THE
RISING GROUND 246
THE LONELY MAN WHO STOOD ON THE RAMPARTS OF KHARTOUM 275
THAT HISTORIC INDABA IN THE MATOPPOS 300
FOREWORD
The Epic of England has yet to be written. It may be that the fulness
of time for writing it has not come yet, or it may be that Britain is
still waiting for her Homer and her Virgil. Perhaps the matured genius
of a Rudyard Kipling, that strong, sweet Singer of the Seven Seas, may
some day address itself to the accomplishment of this most splendid of
all possible tasks, and then, again, it may be that it is his only to
sound the prelude. That is a matter for the gods to decide in their
own good time, but this much is certain--that when this work has been
worthily done the world will hear echoing through the ages such a
thunder-song as has never stirred human hearts before.
It will begin, doubtless, with the battle-cries of the old Sea-Kings of
the North, chanted to the music of their churning oars and the rush and
roar of the foam swirling away under the bows of their longships, and
from them it will go on ringing and thundering through the centuries,
ever swelling in depth and volume as more and more of the races of men
hear it rolling over the battle-fields of conquered lands, until at
last--as every loyal man of English speech must truly hope--the roar
of the Last Battle has rolled away into eternal silence, and north and
south, east and west, the proclaiming of the Pax Britannica heralds the
epoch of
“The Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.”
But in the meantime, while we are waiting for the coming of the singer
whose master-hand shall blend the song and story of Britain into
an epic worthy of his magnificent theme, materials may be gathered
together, old facts may be presented in new lights, and the great
characters who have played their parts in the most tremendous drama
that has ever occupied the Stage of Time may be re-grouped in such
fashion as will make their subtler relationships more plain, and all
this will make the great work readier to the hand of the Master when he
comes.
It is a portion of this minor work that I have set myself here to do.
The making of a nation and the building of nations up into empires
is, humanly speaking, the greatest and noblest work that human hands
and brains can find to do, for the making of an empire means, in its
ultimate analysis, the substitution of order for anarchy, of commerce
for plunder, of civilisation for savagery--in a word, of peace for
strife.
Now, the British Empire as it stands to-day is unquestionably the
greatest moral and material Fact in human history, and hence it is
permissible to assume that the makers of it must, each in his own way,
whether of peace or war, have been the greatest empire-builders the
world has yet seen, and it is my purpose here to take the greatest of
these and tell with such force and vividness as I may, the story of
the man and his work. I am not going to write a series of biographies
arranged in prim chronological ranks, nor am I going to confine myself
to the narration of collated facts so dear to the hearts of educational
inspectors and scholastic examiners. Such you will find already cut and
dried for you in the school-books and in many ponderous tomes, from the
reading of which may your good taste and good sense deliver you!
I shall seek rather to show you the living man doing the living work
which his destiny called him to do. The man will not always be found
of the best, nor the work, seemingly, of the noblest, but what I shall
seek to show you is that the work _had_ to be done in order that a
certain end might be accomplished, and that the man who did it was, all
things considered, the best and, it may be, the only man to do it. In
so far as I do not do this I shall have failed in the doing of my own
work.
One more word seems necessary in order to anticipate certain possible
misconceptions. Our empire-making is not yet complete, even at home.
The centuries of strife during which the hammering and welding
together of the nations which now make up the United Kingdom has been
progressing have naturally and necessarily left certain national
jealousies and antipathies behind them, and the last thing that I
should desire would be to arouse any of these.
There are two kinds of patriotism, a smaller and a greater, a National
and an Imperial. Both are equally good and noble, and it is necessary
that the first should precede the second. But it is equally necessary
that it should not supersede or obscure it, and it is to this later
and greater, this Imperial patriotism that I shall appeal, and I would
ask my readers, whatever their nationality, to remember that on the
burning plains of India and the rolling prairies of Canada, in the vast
expanses of the Australian Bush and the African Veld, there are neither
Englishmen nor Scotsmen, Welshmen nor Irishmen; but only Citizens of
the Empire, brothers in blood and speech, and fellow-workers in the
building up of the noblest and stateliest fabric that human hands have
ever reared or God’s sun has ever shone upon.
I
_WILLIAM THE NORMAN,_
_PIRATE AND NATION-MAKER_
I
WILLIAM THE NORMAN
It may strike those of my readers who have only got their history from
their school-books as somewhat strange that I should begin my record
of British Empire-Makers with a man whom they have been taught to look
upon as a foreigner, an invader, a conqueror, and a ruthless oppressor
of the English.
The answer is simple, though manifold. The school-books are only filled
with potted facts, and are therefore wrong and unreliable. It has been
well said that England was made on the shores of the Baltic Sea and the
German Ocean. The so-called Englishmen who occupied it at the time of
the Conquest were not Englishmen at all, for the simple reason that the
true English race had yet to be born, and, after it, the true British.
The England and Scotland of the eleventh century were peopled, not by
nations, but by tribes mostly at bitter and constant war with each
other. There were still Jutes and Angles, Picts and Scots, Danes and
Swedes and Norwegians, each occupying their own little stretch of
country, and governed, more or less effectually, by their chieftains,
in proof of which it is enough to recall the fact that Harold’s last
fight but one was against his own brother, who had come across the
Narrow Seas at the head of a miscellaneous crowd of hungry pirates to
steal as much as he could of the ownerless heritage that Edward the
Confessor had left behind him.
A good deal of sentiment, more or less born of deftly-written romances,
has glorified the memory of this same Harold. Whether it was deserved
or not does not concern us now, any more than does his right or unright
to the throne of England. It is enough here to grant him all honour as
an able leader of armies, and a man who knew how to snatch victory from
defeat, and glory from disaster by dying like a hero surrounded by the
corpses of his foes.
The idle question whether he or William had the better right to the
crown of England may be left to those who care for such quibbling. Let
us, at the outset, in the words of the Sage of Chelsea, “clear our
minds of cant.” There is no “right” or “wrong” in these things, saving
only the eternal right of the strongest and wisest--the fittest or
most suitable, in short, to wield power and dominion whether the less
fit like it or not. The peoples are thrust headlong into the fiery
crucible of War, and, on the adamantine anvil of Destiny, the Thor’s
Hammer of Battle beats and crushes them into the shape that God has
designed for them. It seems a rude method, but in many thousands of
years we have found no other, so at least we may conclude that it is
the best one known.
There is a very deep meaning in the seemingly flippant and almost
impious saying of Napoleon: “God fights on the side of the biggest
battalions.” He does--but you must reckon the bigness of the
battalions, not only by their numbers, but by the value of their units,
remembering always that one man with a stout heart and a cause he
honestly believes in is worth a score who have neither heart nor faith.
Just such a man was William the Norman, son of Robert the Magnificent,
otherwise styled the Devil, and Arlette the Fair, daughter of Fulbert
the Tanner of Falaise. It is in this birth of his that we find the
first clue to his real greatness. He was born of a union unhallowed
by the sanction of the Church, among a people proud beyond all modern
belief of their royal sea-king ancestry.
How did he come to achieve this almost miraculous triumph over a
prejudice and hostility of which we can now form but a very dim idea?
We have to look no farther than his cradle to find the answer. Lying
there, the little fellow used to grasp the straw in his baby fists
with such a grip that it could not be pulled away from him. The straw
broke first, and ever in his after life what William the Norman laid
hold of he held on to; and that is why he became the first of our
Empire-Makers.
No doubt it was the strain of the old pirate blood which ran so
strongly in his veins that made him this. If we have successfully
cleared our minds of cant, we shall see plainly that, since all nations
begin in piracy of some sort, it is natural to expect that the best
pirates will prove the best Empire-Makers. That old strain is, happily,
not yet exhausted. When it is, Great and Greater Britain will be no
more.
Few men have passed unscathed through such a stormy youth as his was.
When he was seven years old his father, Duke Robert, having exacted
an oath of unwilling fealty from his under-lords to his bonny but
base-born heir, went away on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem from which he
never returned, leaving him to the wardship of his friend, Alan of
Brittany; and soon after Duke Robert’s death became known Alan was
poisoned. After that for a dozen years the boy Duke was in constant
peril of his life.
One night two lads were lying sleeping side by side in the castle of
Vaudreuil, and in the silence and darkness of the night one of the
Montgomeries, bitter enemies of the Lords of Falaise, to whose hate
Alan of Brittany had already fallen a victim, crept up to the bedside
with a naked dagger, and drove it blindly into the heart of one of the
boys and fled.
Young Duke William--he was only a lad of twelve then--woke up to find
himself wet with his playmate’s blood, but all unknowing then how
nearly the history of the world had come to being changed by that foul
and happily misdirected dagger-stroke. Had it found his heart instead
there would have been no Norman Conquest, no blending of the two
strains of blood from which has sprung the Imperial Race of earth, no
British Empire, no United States of America--without all of which the
world would surely have been very different.
Seven more years of plot and intrigue, of strife and turmoil, young
Duke William lived through after this, growing ever keener in mind
and stronger in body, and, as we may well believe, hardening into the
incarnation of ruthless and yet wisely-directed Force which was so
soon to make him a power among men. Before he was twenty he shot his
arrows from a bow which no other man in his dukedom could bend, and he
was already a finished knight, a pattern of the gentleman of his age,
good horseman, good swordsman, gentle towards women and stern towards
men, pure in his morals and moderate in his living; a good Christian
according to his lights and the ideas of his day, and above all
faithful to the ideals that he had set before himself.
Already at nineteen--that is to say in the year 1044--not only had he
shaped his plans for reducing the disorder of his turbulent dukedom to
discipline, but he had made his designs so manifest that the lawless
lords and robber barons could see for themselves how stern a master he
would make--as in good truth he did--and the deadly work of conspiracy
started afresh. One night when he was sleeping in his favourite castle
of Valognes, Golet, his court fool, came hammering at his bedroom door
with his bauble, crying out that some traitor had let the assassins
into the stronghold. He leapt out of bed, huddled on a few clothes as
he ran to the stable, mounted his horse, and galloped away all through
the night toward Falaise along a road which is called the Duke’s Road
to this day. No sooner was he safe across the estuary of the Oune and
Vire and in the Bayeux district than he pulled his dripping, panting
horse up in front of the church of St. Clement, dismounted and knelt
down to say his prayers and thank God for his merciful deliverance.
Such was the youth who was father to the man justly styled William the
Conqueror.
It was not long after this that the years of intrigue and plotting
ended in armed revolt. Guy of Burgundy, William’s kinsman and once his
playmate, looked with greedy eyes on the fair lands of Normandy. He
was master of many provinces already, and among his hosts of friends
there were not a few of William’s own under-lords, in whose breasts
still rankled the shame of owning a bastard for their master. To his
side came the Viscount of Coutance, Randolph of Bayeux, Hamon of
Thorigny and Creuilly, and that Grimbald of Plessis whose hand was
to have slain William that night in Valognes, and in the end this
long-gathering storm burst on the grassy slopes of Val-ès-Dunes.
Master Wace the Chronicler, in his “Roman de Rou,” gives us a brilliant
little picture of that long-past scene where the future Conqueror won
his spurs--of many a brave and gallant gentleman clad _cap-à-pie_ in
shining mail, seated on mighty chargers impatiently pawing the ground,
of long lances gay with fluttering ribbons tied on by dainty hands that
morning, of waving plumes and flaunting pennons, and mild-eyed cattle
grazing knee-deep in the long wet grass in peaceful ignorance of the
bloody work that was about to be done.
But with all this we have little to do, and one episode must suffice.
The starkest warrior among the rebels was Hardrez, Lord of Bayeux, and
he, like many another, had sworn to slay William that day with his own
hands. The oath had proved fatal to others before it did to him, but
at length his turn came. Young Duke William saw him from afar, and
with lance in rest made for him at a gallop. One of the knights who
had followed Hardrez to battle charged at him in mid-course. The next
moment horse and man went rolling in the grass, and William, dropping
his splintered lance, drew his sword, and, the Lord of Bayeux coming up
at the instant, he drove the good steel with one shrewd, strong thrust
through mail and flesh and bone, and Hardrez never spoke again.
That stroke won William his dukedom, and the Chronicler, though a man
of Bayeux himself, tells in stirring lines how the young lord and his
faithful knights hunted the flying rebels off the field and rode them
down like sheep.
This was not the last fight that William had for the mastery of his
own land, but it left his hands free to begin the work that he had set
himself to do, and he did it. To him unity was strength, and he was
ready to go to any lengths to get it. His methods then, as afterwards
in England, were severe--we should call them brutal nowadays, but these
days are not those.
[Illustration: HE DROVE THE GOOD STEEL THROUGH MAIL AND FLESH AND BONE.]
When the citizens of Alençon defied him they indulged in the pleasantry
of hanging raw hides over the walls and beating them, shouting out the
while that here there was plenty for the tanner’s son to do. He set
his teeth and swore his favourite oath--by the Splendour of God--that
they should have work enough ere he had done with them. When the city
lay at his mercy he had two-and-thirty of the humourists sent out to
him, and cut off their ears and noses and hands and feet, and had
them tossed over the walls as a sort of hint that he was not quite the
kind of person who could appreciate jokes about his ancestors. It was
an inhuman deed, but history records no other public aspersions of the
good name of Duke William’s mother.
Yet one more battle the young Duke had to fight before he crossed
the Narrow Seas to the famous field of Senlac. Henry of France, his
titular overlord, and Geoffrey of Anjou, jealous of the fast-growing
power of Normandy, united their forces in an expedition which was half
an invasion and half a plundering raid. Duke William, with infinite
patience, and a quiet, marvellous self-restraint, held his own fiery
temper and the angry ardour of his knights in check, watching the
invaders burn town after town and village after village, and turning
some of his fairest domains into a wilderness.
He never struck a blow until, one fatal afternoon, he swooped down from
Falaise and caught the French army severed in two by the rising flood
of the river Dive. Then he struck, and struck hard, and when the bloody
work was over, Henry was glad to buy a truce and his liberty from his
vassal with the strong castle of Tillièries and all its lands, and so
heavy hearted was he at his defeat that, as the Chronicler tells us,
“he never bore shield or spear again.”
Normandy had now become the most orderly and best governed country in
Europe. Robbers, noble and otherwise, were ruthlessly suppressed, and
the poorest possessed their goods in peace, while William himself had
time to turn his thoughts to the gentler, and yet not less important,
concerns of policy and love-making.
The old story of his courtship of the fair Matilda of Flanders with a
riding whip is evidently a myth manufactured by some Saxon enemy, for
Duke William was in the first place a gentleman, and, moreover, the
lady and her parents were as anxious as he was for the marriage, seeing
that he was now the most desirable of suitors. The truth is that the
Church opposed their union on some shadowy grounds of consanguinity,
and it did not take place until after a courtship of four years.
And now, having got our pirate Duke happily married and seen him
undisputed lord of his own realm, we may go with him to St. Valery on
the coast of Ponthieu and watch him working and praying and offering
gifts at the old shrine, during those fifteen long days that he watched
the weather-cocks and prayed for the south wind that was to waft his
fleet and army over to the English shore.
It was on Wednesday, the 27th of September, that the wind at last
veered round. The eager soldiery hailed the change as the granting
of their prayers and the consent of Heaven to the beginning of their
enterprise, and flung themselves into their ships like a great host of
schoolboys setting out on a holiday. Soon the grey sea was covered
with a swarm of craft, and it must have seemed as though the old Viking
days had come back as the great square sails went up to the mast-heads,
and the shining shields were hung along the bulwarks.
William himself, in his golden ship _Mora_, the present of his own
dear Duchess, led the way with the sacred banner of the Pope at his
mast-head, and the three Lions of Normandy floating astern. The _Mora_
was lighter heeled or lighter loaded than the rest, for when morning
dawned she was alone on the sea with the Sussex shore in plain sight.
But presently a great forest of masts and clouds of gaily-coloured
sails rose up out of the grey waters astern, and the whole vast fleet
came on, urged by oar and wind, and by nine o’clock that morning the
fore-foot of the _Mora_, close followed by her consorts, struck the
English ground in Pevensey Bay.
It has often been told how William, as he landed, stumbled and fell on
his hands and knees, and how those near him cried out that it was a
fatal omen. The story may be myth or fact, but nothing could be more
characteristic of the true man than his springing to his feet with both
hands full of sand and laughing out in that great voice of his:
“Nay, by the Splendour of God, not so. See! Have I not taken seizin of
my new kingdom and lawful heritage?”
But the army of the so-called English, that they had come to seek was
nowhere to be found, and some days were spent in uncertainty and debate
as to whether they should march on London or await battle on the shore
with their sea communications open, and in the end they took the latter
and the wiser course.
Meanwhile, as has been said, Harold was away in the North fighting and
beating his brother Tostig and his fellow robbers, and the news of
Duke William’s landing was flying northward to him. It must have been
something of an anxious time for both--the Norman waiting day after
day in that deadly inaction which is most fatal of all things to the
courage and discipline of an army, and Harold hurrying southward at
the head of his victorious troops, knowing that he was about to try
conclusions with the best leader and the finest soldiery in Europe.
It is of little import here and to us now which of them had the best
right, as the lawyer-quibble has it, to that which they were about to
fight for. The point is that such claims as either had they were going
to submit to the stern and final ordeal of battle--and in good truth a
stern ordeal it proved to be.
As he came to the South the standard of Harold--the Fighting Man--was
joined by troops of recruits attracted by the fame of his northern
victory, and it was a great and really formidable army which at length
assembled between London and the Sussex coast. Meanwhile the Normans,
after the fashion of the pitiless warfare of those days, were dividing
their time between the building of entrenched camps and ravaging,
plundering, and burning throughout the pleasant Southern land.
Of course messages and parleyings passed between them. Harold from his
royal house at Westminster bade Duke William come and fight him for his
capital and his kingdom, to which Duke William warily replied: “Come
and drive us into the sea if you can!” This at length King Harold was
forced to attempt. And so it came to pass that, at length, on the 14th
of October, the hosts of the Saxon and the Norman confronted each other
on the field of Senlac by Hastings, on the morrow to strike blows whose
echoes were to ring through many a long century, and to do deeds more
mighty in their effect than either Harold or William dreamt of.
The Norman host has been called a horde of mailed robbers and
cut-throats, eager only for plunder, and the Saxon army has been almost
canonised as a band of heroes, gathered together to die in defence of
their native land and their lawful king. Yet, strangely enough, the
robbers and cut-throats spent the best part of the night confessing
their sins and praying for victory, as well as in making the best
dispositions to attain it. The patriots spent the same hours feasting
and drinking, and swaggering to each other about the brave deeds they
had done in the North and the greater things they were going to do on
the morrow.
So the night passes, and the morning dawns grey and chill on the two
now silent hosts. Then from the Norman ranks rises the solemn cadence
of the Te Deum, and as this dies away the archers move out--forerunners
of those stout yeomen whose clothyard shafts were one day to win
Creçy and Agincourt. Then come the footmen with their long pikes, and
after them the mailed and mounted knights, in front of whom rides
Taillefer--Iron-Cutter and Minstrel--tossing his sword into the air and
catching it, and singing the while the Song of Roland and Roncesvalles.
As the archers and pikemen spread out in skirmishing order he sets
spurs to his horse and charges at the Saxon line. He kills two men, and
then goes down under the battle-axe of a third.
Then the arrows flew fast and thick, and charge after charge was made
upon the palisades of stakes that fenced the Saxon position, high above
which floated the Dragon Standard of Wessex and the banner of the
Fighting Man.
But the double-bladed Saxon axes were no playthings, and they were
swung by strong and strenuous arms, and every time the Norman
front came up to the breastwork it was hewn down in swathes by the
deep-biting blades. The arrows fell blunted and broken on the big
Saxon shields and stout Saxon armour, and so Duke William, with
that ever-ready resource of his, bade his archers shoot up into the
air, and then down from the grey sky there fell a rain of whirring,
steel-pointed shafts, one of which, winged by Fate, struck gallant
Harold in the eye--doubtless as he was looking up wondering at this new
manœuvre--and, piercing his brain, laid him lifeless in the midst of
his champions.
[Illustration: DUKE WILLIAM ROARED OUT THAT HE WAS ALIVE.]
Soon after this a cry went up that Duke William too was dead, and he,
hearing this, tore off his helmet--a somewhat unsafe thing to do in
such a fight--and roared out that he was alive, swearing--as usual by
the Splendour of God--that the land of England should yet be his by
nightfall.
So they laid on again. William’s horse went down under a pike-thrust.
He clove the pike-man to the chin and asked one of his knights to lend
him his horse. The knight refused, thinking more of his skin than his
loyalty, whereupon William pitched him out of the saddle, swung himself
up, and led another charge against the ever-dwindling ring of heroes
who were still hammering away with their battle-axes--and this time the
stout line wavers and breaks; the mail-clad warriors pour up the slope,
shouting that the day is won; axe and sword ring loud and fast on helm
and mail, the Saxons reel back, closing round the body of their king
and the staff of his banner.
“_Dex aide! Dex aide! Ha-Rou! Ha-Rou!_” Duke William’s men yell and
roar again as they scramble over heaps of mangled corpses filling the
trenches and blocking the breaches in the palisades. Another moment
or two of brief, bitter, and bloody struggle and the last Saxon ring
breaks and melts away, and Hastings and England are won.
What followed is history so familiar that few words more from me will
suffice. What Duke William had done in his own land he did after the
same methods in the land that had been the Saxons’. Cruel, bloody, and
savage they were beyond all doubt, but it is a question whether, even
in the doing, they were more disastrous than the ferocious anarchy and
the unceasing plunder and outrage and murder that had disgraced the
weak and divided rule of the Saxon kings. In their effect they were
a thousandfold better. Duke William believed that order was Heaven’s
first law, and, by whatever means he had at hand, he was honestly
determined to make it earth’s as well. And he succeeded, which after
all is not an unsatisfactory test of honest merit. How well he did so
let us ask, not one of his own chroniclers or troubadours, but the man
who wrote the story of his own conquered people, and this is what he
will tell us:
“Truly he was so stark a man and wroth that no man durst do anything
against his will. Bishops he set off their bishoprics, and abbots off
their abbacies, and thanes in prison. And at last he did not spare his
brother Odo. Him he set in prison. Betwixt other things we must not
forget the good peace that he made in this land, so that a man that was
worth aught might travel over the kingdom unhurt with his bosom full
of gold. And no man durst slay another though he had suffered never so
mickle evil from the other.”
Such was this grim, stern, Thor’s-Hammer of a man, who by his strength
and cunning hewed into shape that which in after days was to become the
corner-stone of the glorious, world-shadowing fabric which we call the
British Empire.
II
_EDWARD OF THE LONG LEGS_
“_BURY ME NOT TILL YOU HAVE CONQUERED SCOTLAND_”
II
EDWARD OF THE LONG LEGS
Two centuries all but nine years have passed away since William the
Conqueror, unwept, if not unhonoured, lost his life in avenging a
paltry joke, and left his work for others to carry on. In the two
centuries not much has been done, although no little show has been made
meanwhile, and a great clash of arms has resounded through the world.
William the Red has died, as he lived, in a somewhat ignoble and futile
manner. Henry I. has done one good thing, wedding, as it were, in his
own person and that of the Lady Matilda, the two races which were
afterwards to be one.
Stephen and Matilda have settled their differences and died, after the
shedding of much wasted blood. Henry II., by the hand of Strongbow and
his licensed pirates, has done a piece of good work badly in beginning
that conquest of Ireland which is not to be completed until the Battle
of the Boyne is lost and won.
Richard Lionheart has won much glory to very small profit in the
magnificent madness of the Third Crusade. The barons, recognising,
however dimly and clumsily, that they are, in good truth, citizens of
the infant State whose lusty, turbulent youth already gives promise
of its future strength and greatness, have become law-lords as well
as landlords, and with mailed hands have guided that unwilling pen of
John’s along the bottom of the parchment on which the Great Charter is
written.
And, lastly, Simon of Montfort has taken a swift stride through several
centuries and, arriving at the modern idea that the making of nations
and the ordering of the world can be achieved by Talk, has, after
not a little violence and the spilling of considerable blood that
might have been better spent, got together that first Parliament or
Talking-Machine, whose successors have so sorely hindered the progress
of the world and balked the efforts of those appointed by God, and not
by the counting of noses, to do its work.
So the two noisy and somewhat foolish centuries have rolled away into a
blessed oblivion with a good deal of shouting and swaggering, of strife
and bloodshed, but of little progress, saving that one Roger Bacon has
lived and written a certain book and made himself a name for ever.
But all this time the work with which we are here most concerned, the
making of an empire, has been waiting for the next God-sent man to come
and do it, and this man was Edward Plantagenet, surnamed Longlegs,
next in lineal succession, not as king, but as Empire-Maker, to him who
won the fight at Senlac and got himself so well obeyed that “no man
durst do anything against his will”--which was a great deal to say of
any one in such days as those.
Edward of the Long Legs came on to the stage of History with long,
swift, determined, and, in short, wholly characteristic strides. The
Talking-Machine of the good Earl Simon had worked noisily, as is usual
with such machines, and had produced little but sound and fury.
There was war all round, and the usual anarchy in Ireland and Wales.
Llewelyn, Lord of Snowdon, for instance, had pitted himself gallantly
against the logic of circumstances, and was seeking to reconstruct the
ancient and now impossibly obsolete Celtic empire.
“_Be of good courage in the slaughter, cling to thy work, destroy
England and plunder its multitudes!_” his bards had sung to him, and
so he had honestly set himself to do, not recognising the fact that
empires are neither made nor re-made by mere methods of miscellaneous
blood-letting.
To the north, Scotland was divided by schisms and rent by the bitter
jealousies of its nobles and clan-chieftains, savage, rude and poor,
but gallant, strong, and very full of fight, as the English were to
learn later on.
Over the Narrow Seas the wide domains which William the Norman had
kept with his sword and which the second Henry had greatly increased by
inheritance and marriage, were slipping piecemeal away from the throne
to which they did not of right divine belong, and with which it was
therefore impossible that they should remain.
Such, in briefest outline, was the scene into which Edward Longlegs
strode, and of which he was to be for thirty-five years the central and
dominating figure. His first look round, as it were, showed him the
nature of the task which it was his destiny to forthwith set about.
With that clearness of vision without which no man has any chance
of success in the business of empire-making, he instantly pierced
the dust-storms of battle that were rising all about him, and the
mist-clouds of debate which Earl Simon’s Talking-Machine had commenced
to vomit forth, and behind and beyond these he saw a certain Fact, a
prime necessity which had to be faced--in short a real Something of an
infinitely greater importance than tribal warfare, the aspirations of
bard-inspired princelings, or even parliamentary debates.
This was neither more nor less than the fact that, when the Maker of
all things mapped out this part of the world, it pleased Him in His
wisdom to put England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland into one little
group of islands, and from this fact Edward Longlegs drew the deduction
that the King of Kings had intended them to be under one lordship.
It seems a simple thing to say now, a fact so patent that the
mention of it seems superfluous. So does the larger fact that the
world is round; but it was a very different matter in the times
and circumstances of Edward Longlegs, and, indeed, his first and
greatest claim to stand next in succession to William the Norman
in the royal line of empire-makers consists in this: that he was
capable of that master-stroke of genius which clearly demonstrated an
imperial principle of which six hundred years of history have been the
continuous and emphatic endorsement.
No sooner was the bloody fight of Evesham over and the good Earl Simon
had breathed out his generous, if somewhat premature soul in that last
cry of his: “It is God’s grace!” than Edward Longlegs seems to have
set himself to prepare for the task that was to be his. He was not to
be king in name for some seven years more, but as the historian of
the English People with great pertinence remarked: “With the victory
of Evesham, his character seemed to mould itself into nobler form.”
In other words he was, perchance unconsciously, performing that
indispensable preliminary to all really great and true public reforms,
the reformation of himself.
Hitherto his life had been none of the best. He had been the leader of
a retinue that had made itself something like infamous in the land.
He had intrigued first with one party and then with another. He is
accused of a faithlessness which, it is said, forced the good, though
mistaken, Earl Simon into armed revolt against his liege lord--though
this may, after all, only have been a stroke of wise and necessary
policy, since he possibly saw even then that Chaos would not reform
itself into Cosmos just for being talked at.
Then again, and with curious resemblance to William of Normandy, and
later of Hastings and England, he had avenged an insult to his mother
by the slaughter of some three thousand men in the rout of Lewes and
a quite unjustifiable indulgence in pillage and slaughter when the
Barons’ War was finally over.
“It was from Earl Simon,” says John Richard Green in one of those
limpid sentences of his, “as the Earl owned with a proud bitterness
ere his death, that Edward had learnt the skill in warfare which
distinguished him among the princes of his time. But he had learnt from
the Earl the far nobler lesson of a self-government which lifted him
high above them as ruler among men.”
It seemed, indeed, as though, by this reformation of himself, he was to
typify that reformation of England which it was his life-work to begin.
The new Edward was to be the maker of the new England.
His first action after the war was characteristic of the man and
the work that he was to do. The cessation of the fighting, as was
usual in those days, had left an undesirable number of truculent
warriors of various ranks wandering at large about the kingdom with
their legitimate occupation gone. Edward, with that instinct of
order characteristic of all true empire-makers, saw in these the
possibilities of disorder, and with a happy combination of wisdom and
adventure turned their swords and lances away from the bodies of their
fellow-citizens by taking them to fight the Paynim in the Holy Land.
An incident of this excursion has been adorned by one of those pleasant
fictions which, if the paradox may be pardoned, are none the less true
for the fact that they are false. Edward, having sent certain hundreds
of Moslems to Paradise with a perhaps unnecessarily ruthless dispatch,
was considered by the sect of the Assassins to be a person who would be
better dead than alive in Palestine, and so one of them, after several
attempts, succeeded, as one may put it, in interviewing him privately
with a poisoned dagger. The fiction has it that his consort, Eleanor of
Castille, sucked the poison from the wound with her own sweet lips and
so saved his life.
It is a pretty story, but, unfortunately for its authenticity, no
one seems to have heard of it or thought it worth the telling until
Ptolemy of Lucca told it a good half-century afterwards. But the
truth underlying it remains, and this truth is that Edward Longlegs
was blessed with that greatest of all earthly blessings, a loving and
devoted wife.
The facts of the matter are few but eloquent. Edward saw the dagger
before it struck him, and gripped the would-be murderer with a grip
worthy the muscles of Lionheart himself. There was a struggle, during
which the dagger-point scratched his arm. A moment after it was buried
in the assassin’s own heart. Then some of Edward’s retainers, hearing
the scuffling, burst into the tent and satisfied themselves that the
wretch had attempted his last murder by the somewhat superfluous method
of knocking out his brains with a foot-stool.
Soon after this symptoms of poisoning showed themselves, and Edward, in
his usual businesslike way, made his will and his peace with God and
prepared to “salute the world” with becoming dignity. In the end not
Eleanor’s lips but the surgeon’s knife removed the danger, and so once
again a dagger-thrust which had come near to changing the history of
Britain missed its mark.
It was during his return from this Crusade, as he was journeying
through Calabria, that he met the messengers who told him that his
father was dead and that he was King of England. Charles of Anjou,
who was riding with him at the moment, wondered at the great grief he
showed, and, being himself a man almost incapable of feeling, asked
him why he should show more grief at his father’s death than he had
done for the loss of his baby son who had died a short time before. The
answer was to the point and worthy of the man.
[Illustration: EDWARD GRIPPED THE WOULD-BE MURDERER.]
“By the goodness of God,” he said, “the loss of my boy may be made good
to me, but not even God’s own mercy can give me a father again.”
It was on the same journey that there occurred that curious incident
which is called the “Little Battle of Chalons,” and which is also
instructive in giving us another view of the man who could use such
wise and pious words as these. While he was travelling through Guienne,
the Count of Chalons, one of the best and starkest knights of his age,
sent a friendly message to request the favour of being allowed to break
a lance with him. Edward, though he had been repeatedly warned of plots
against his life by those who had designs on his French dominions, and
though as a king he had a perfect right to decline the challenge of a
vassal, was, as we should say nowadays, too good a sportsman to say no;
but he took the precaution of going to the knightly trysting-place with
an escort of a thousand men--in doing which he was well justified by
the fact that the Count of Chalons was there waiting for him with about
two thousand.
During the trouble which inevitably followed, the Count of Chalons did
break a lance with Edward, but it was his own lance, and this failing,
he gripped him round the neck in the most unknightly fashion and tried
to drag him from the saddle. The Count was a strong man, but Edward was
a little stronger, so he just sat still, and swinging his horse round,
pulled him out of the saddle instead, after which, to put it into plain
English, he gave him a sound thrashing, and when he at length cried
for quarter, Edward, ever generous in the moment of victory, gave him
the life that he had forfeited by his treachery, but, as a punishment,
which the coroneted scoundrel justly deserved, he compelled him to take
his sword back from the hands of a common soldier, and so disgraced him
for ever in the eyes of his peers.
It may be added that the Little Battle of Chalons, in spite of the
difference of numbers, ended in something like a picnic for the
English, after which the king betook himself in leisurely fashion to
the throne, and the work that was waiting for him.
No sooner was the crown upon his head, than he got to his task. The
Prince of Snowdon, now calling himself Prince of Wales, had not only
made himself master of his own country, but had pushed the war into
England and reduced several English towns, the chief of which was
Shrewsbury. Edward called upon him to restore the peace which he had
broken, and to come and do homage for his lands. Llewelyn, in the
plentitude of his pride, told him to come and fetch him.
Edward took a note of this, but waited two years while he replenished
the royal treasury by more or less justifiable means. During this time,
as it happened, the Prince’s promised bride, Eleanor, daughter of Earl
Simon, fell into his hands. Again and again he summoned the Prince to
perform the act of allegiance, holding his sweetheart meanwhile as a
hostage in honourable captivity.
At length a fresh defiance from the Welshman roused him to action, and
Longlegs strode swiftly across England and struck out hard and heavy.
A single blow dissipated the dream of Celtic empire for ever. Llewelyn
fled to his mountains and at length sued for peace. By rights his life
was forfeit for rebellion, yet Edward not only forgave him but remitted
the fine of £50,000 which he had imposed on the Welsh chieftains, and
then invited Llewelyn to his court and married him with all due pomp
and circumstance to the daughter of his old enemy--from which it will
be seen that Edward Longlegs, like William the Norman, and indeed all
good and capable empire-makers, was a gentleman.
Unhappily, Llewelyn repaid the kindness and courtesy by new rebellion,
which ended, as it deserved, in disaster. Merlin had prophesied that,
when money was made round, a Welsh prince should be crowned in London.
During this last revolt Edward had caused round halfpence and farthings
to be coined. When it was over the head of Llewelyn was sent to London
and crowned with a garland of ivy on Tower Hill.
What Longlegs had thus done with Wales he sought by more devious and
less effective means to do with Scotland. The dispute between Balliol
and Bruce gave him the opportunity of intervention, and of this the
dismal results are too well known to need detailed description at this
time of day.
Here, again, we have nothing to do with personal right or wrong, or
with the ethics of national independence. The business of empire-making
is too urgent to wait for matters of this kind. It would perhaps have
been better if Edward, after the sack and slaughter of Berwick, had
hurled the whole weight of the English power against the object of his
attack, as William the Norman would have done, and once and for all
crushed the opposition into impotence.
It would have been bitter and bloody work, as the work of empire-making
is apt to be, but the end might have justified the means. Certainly
some centuries of bloodshed and bitterness would have been saved. The
high ideal of a United Kingdom would have been realised nearly five
hundred years earlier, and the progress of both realms in civilisation,
wealth, and power might have been quickened immeasurably.
And after all, neither side in the long struggle would have lost
anything worthy of being weighed against the greatness of the gain to
both. There would have been no Stirling Bridge, but then there would
have been no Falkirk; no Bannockburn, but also no Flodden Field. All
this, as it happens, however, was not written in the Book of Destiny,
and so it does not concern us here, since we have to consider how much
of the work of empire-making Edward did, not what he failed to do or
left undone.
The surrender of Stirling in 1305 apparently completed the conquest of
Scotland, and Edward was for the time being the actual and undisputed
sovereign of the whole country from the Pentland Firth to the English
Channel, and it is probable that the conquest would have been a
permanent one but for the entrance of another power into the field,
and this was nothing less than the English Baronage itself. It was as
though the chiefs of his own army had turned against him, and, in the
fatal dispute which followed, Robert the Bruce saw his opportunity, and
in the end re-won for Scotland that independence which has cost her so
much and which, however precious as a matter of sentiment, was destined
to prove of so little value to her.
All that is past and done with now, but still no one who holds that an
empire is greater than a nation, even as the whole is greater than its
part, can help looking back with regretful thoughts upon those pages of
our history which would have been so much brighter and more glorious if
those gallant Scots who fought through those long and bitter wars could
have stood, as they have done since, side by side with their brothers
of the South, and so made possible centuries ago the beginning of that
great work in which they have borne so splendid a part.
Had that been so Edward Longlegs might have been the founder instead
of only one of the makers of the British Empire, and that last piteous
scene by the sandy shores of the Solway Firth would never have been
enacted.
But though in the end he neither conquered Scotland nor founded the
United Kingdom, he did something else which, as the centuries went by,
proved but little less important, for he began to make the British
Constitution.
Gallant soldier and great general as he was, he was perhaps an even
greater statesman. He saw far ahead of his times, too far indeed, for
in his enlightened conviction that in the matter of taxation “what
touched all should be allowed of all” we have the real reason for that
revolt of the Baronage, which made a United Kingdom of the Fourteenth
Century an impossibility.
Yet as law-maker he did work which lasted longer than that which he
did on the battle-field. Like William the Norman, he was a stark man
who knew how to get himself obeyed, and order, no matter how dearly
bought, was the first thing to be got, and he got it. He could “make a
wilderness and call it peace,” as he did over and over again with Wales
and Scotland--and, indeed, to him a wilderness was better than a place
where disorder dwelt--but he also made another peace within his own
realms which was the first forerunner of that which we enjoy to-day.
The laws which he made were for rich and poor, great and small, alike.
The hand that was pitiless in destruction was also ready and strong to
protect.
The manner of his death is as characteristic as any of the acts, good
or bad, of his life. Old and weak and sick, he made the long journey
from Westminster to the Solway to fulfil the oath which he had sworn at
the knighting of his unworthy son to avenge Bruce’s murder of Comyns
and to punish his rebellion.
Too feeble to keep the saddle, he was carried in a litter at the head
of the hundred thousand men who were to be the instruments of his
vengeance, but at length the news of victory after victory won by the
Bruce stung him to a fury which for the time was stronger than his
weakness, and at Carlisle the old warrior left his litter and once
more mounted his charger. It is a pathetic sight even when looked at
through the mists of the intervening centuries. We can picture the
gallant struggle that he must have made to sit his horse upright and
to bear without fainting the weight of the armour that was oppressing
his disease-worn and weary limbs. The mailed hand which had struck the
great Count of Chalons down could not now even draw the sword that hung
useless at his side.
Only one thing remained strong in the man who had once been the very
incarnation of strength. His inflexible will was still unbroken and
unswerving in its devotion to the great ideal and master-project of
his life. Had that will had its way, the flood of English strength
and valour that was rolling slowly behind him would have burst in a
torrent of death and desolation over the war-wasted fields of southern
Scotland, and there can be but little doubt as to what the end would
have been.
But it was not to be. The Spectre Horseman was already riding by his
side, and, like the wine from a cracked goblet, the dregs of his
once splendid strength ebbed away. At last the skeleton hand was
outstretched, and he who had never been unhorsed by mortal foe was
stricken from the saddle. Yet even then the proud spirit refused to
yield. He took his place in the litter again. With almost dying lips he
ordered the army forward; and, though the end was very near, he did not
submit without a struggle, pathetic in its hopeless heroism, to conquer
even Death itself and carry out his purpose in spite of the King of
Terrors. Die he must, and that soon, but his spirit should live after
him and he would still lead his army.
“Bury me not till you have conquered Scotland!” were almost the last
words he spoke. Though they were disobeyed and Scotland was never
conquered, yet they were well worthy of the iron-hearted man who said
them.
III
_THE QUEEN’S LITTLE PIRATE_
“_THE MASTER-THIEF OF THE NEW WORLD_”
III
THE QUEEN’S LITTLE PIRATE
Another couple of centuries with a few added years have slipped
away, and the next scene of the slowly-unfolding drama opens on the
sea instead of the land. The Idea which Edward of the Long Legs had
so clearly conceived and so very nearly realised, the idea that the
frontiers of the United Kingdom of which he had dreamt should be its
sea-coasts has all the time been growing and deepening, for, like all
ideas which faithfully reflect some fact in the universe, it could not
die, and was bound some day to become a fact itself.
Politically, England and Scotland were still independent kingdoms, but
many old differences had been forgotten and forgiven, and they had
come a great deal closer, as it was fitting that they should do on the
eve of their final union. Moreover, they were one in their dread and
hatred of that cruel and implacable Colossus which, with one foot on
the East and the other on the West, bestrode the world, drawing vast
treasures from hidden El Dorados with which it built countless ships,
and hired and armed innumerable men for the enslavement of mankind. For
now we have reached those “spacious times of great Elizabeth,” when
that lusty young giant of Liberty, recently born into the world, was
girding on his armour, and making him ready to grapple with the powers
of oppression and darkness which were just then most fitly incarnated
in the shape of Spain.
It is almost impossible for us of the present day to understand clearly
what the Spain of those days was. She was the first naval and military
Power in the world, her ships and armies were everywhere, her wealth
was honestly believed to be illimitable, and moreover she was the
recognised champion of the Catholic Church, whose spiritual thunders
mingled with the roar of her guns, and which supplemented the terror of
her arms by all the diabolical enginry of torture and the awful powers
of the Holy Office.
The world, in short, was on the eve of great and marvellous doings--on
the one hand so terrible in their deadly earnestness and tremendous
consequences, and on the other so fantastically splendid in their
almost superhuman daring and undreamt-of rewards, that it looked as
though the Fates were preparing some gigantic miracle wherewith to
astound mankind. And so, in sober truth, they were, and the miracle
about to be wrought was the making of what we now call the British
Empire.
In the beginning of the latter half of the sixteenth century there was
a yellow-haired, blue-eyed, round-faced and sturdily-built youngster
sailing to and fro as ship’s boy in a tiny cockle-shell of a craft
plying with the humbler kinds of merchandise between the Thames and
the coasts of France and Flanders. Whether or not he had heard any of
those wondrous stories which the western gales were wafting across the
Atlantic from the golden Spanish Main we do not know, but probably he
had, and, like many another sailor-lad of his day, he had dreamt wild
dreams of blue seas and bright skies, of white-walled cities crammed
with gold, and of stately galleons staggering across that mysterious
sea stuffed to the deck with the treasures they were bringing to pour
into the coffers of the King of Spain.
And yet, wild as these dreams may have been, they would have been
commonplace in comparison with the bewildering exploits with which
this same blue-eyed sailor-lad was one day to realise and excel them.
For this was he whose name the mariners of Spain were soon to hear
shrieked out by the voice of the tempest, booming in the roar of guns,
and echoing through the crash of battle. This, in a word, was Francis
Drake--El Draque, the Dragon, child and servant of the Devil himself,
Scourge of the Church and Plunderer of the Faithful.
As I say, he may or may not have heard the story of the Golden West,
but it is quite certain that he did hear much of the black and terrible
tales which the refugees and exiles from France and the Netherlands
had to tell, for not a few of them crossed over in the little barque
in which he served, and he could not fail to hear what they had to say
of the murders and massacres, the torturing and outrage with which
Spain was disgracing her knightly fame and her ancient faith. They are
horrible enough for us to read even here in the security which that
gallant struggle won for us, and now when we can only hear the shrieks
of the tortured and the groans of the dying echoing faintly across
the gulf of three centuries; but what must they have been to Francis
Drake when he heard them told by those whose eyes had only just before
looked upon the hideous reality--perhaps indeed by some of those racked
and mutilated unfortunates who had managed to escape with their lives
to seek the sheltering hospitality of Gloriana the Queen? Was it any
wonder that deep down in his boyish heart there were planted those
seeds of hate and horror which later on were to bear such terrible
fruit?
The lad Francis seems to have performed his duties as ship’s boy as
well as he did everything else, whether it was leading the Queen’s
ships to harry the coast of Spain or raging and storming through one of
his piratical raids among the Fortunate Isles of the West, for when
his master died he made him his heir, and so Francis became a trader
on his own account. For a few years he was just a peaceful shipmaster,
making an honest and hard-won living; but all this time events were
arranging themselves in more and more martial array, and the bursting
of the storm was not very far off.
The actual fighting did not begin in the guise of recognised warfare
for a very considerable time. Spain and England were at peace, each
trying to humbug the other, but between Protestant and Catholic it
was otherwise. Armed cruisers manned by angry Protestants made their
appearance in the Narrow Seas, and whenever they got a chance fell upon
Catholic ships and avenged the sufferings of their fellow-heretics in a
fashion at once prompt and pitiless, and this at length so exasperated
Philip that he closed his ports to English trade, and Drake’s
occupation was gone. Better, in truth, had it been for Philip if he had
left him undisturbed in his business!
He sold his little vessel, went to Plymouth, and entered the service
of two kinsmen of his, one of whom was soon to prove somewhat of an
empire-maker in his own line and whose name, with certain others
soon to be mentioned, was destined to go down to everlasting fame
indissolubly linked with that of Francis Drake. This was Captain John
Hawkins, and when the young trader reached Plymouth he had just come
back with a shipload of gold and other precious things from his first
venture in slave-trading, and now at least Drake, who was still a lad
in his teens, must have heard something of the wonders of El Dorado.
Yet, curiously enough, when Captain Hawkins went back he did not go
with him. He sailed instead, as a sort of supercargo, in another of
Hawkins’ ships to Biscay, and there a momentous revelation awaited him,
as though to guide him on the path of his destiny.
At San Sebastian about a score of English sailors, once strong and
stalwart men of Devon, crept out of the dungeons of the Inquisition and
took passage with him home. King Philip had taken off his embargo now,
and these men were the remnant of the crew of a Plymouth ship which he
had seized in port when the embargo was laid on. The others had rotted
to death during the six months that he had bestowed his hospitality
upon them. We can imagine what talks they had on the way home, and no
doubt El Draque bore the stories of these forlorn mariners well in mind
on that most memorable day when he “singed the King of Spain’s beard”
at Cadiz.
John Hawkins came back from his second voyage richer than ever, and
now all the mariners of the South Coast were beginning to dream golden
dreams which were soon to become yet more golden deeds, and King
Philip, to whom all such ventures were the flattest piracy, began to
fear for his monopoly and instructed his ambassador in London to drop
the hint that foreign trade with the Indies was forbidden, upon which,
foolishly enough, or perhaps not knowing their own true strength, Queen
Bess’s councillors backed down and forbade John Hawkins to start again.
He, obediently enough, stayed at home, but a certain George Lovell got
together an expedition and slipped out to sea, westward bound. With him
went Francis Drake, at length to see for the first time the blue waters
and green shores of El Dorado. This time, however, it proved anything
but golden for him or his companions, for they came back with shattered
ships and still worse broken fortunes. They had drawn a blank in the
great lottery which half Europe was wanting to gamble in.
Nothing daunted, he shipped again, this time with George Fenner, bound
for Guiana. Again, financially speaking, the voyage ended in disaster,
but there was one incident in it destined to bear good fruit. A big
Portuguese galleasse, backed up by six gunboats, tried to enforce the
prohibition against foreign trade. Fenner had one ship and a pinnace,
and with these he fought the “Portugals” and thoroughly convinced them
by the logic of shot and steel that he was not the sort of man to be
prohibited from doing anything he wanted to do.
This forgotten action is really one of great importance. It was
Francis Drake’s first taste of fighting, which in itself means a good
deal, but it was also the beginning of that lordly and magnificent
contempt which the English mariners of that day were soon to feel for
all enemies, no matter how strong they might seem. It was this spirit
which a few years later was to take Sir Richard Grenville
“With his hundred men on deck and his ninety sick below,”
into the midst of the fifty-three Spanish ships which he fought for an
afternoon and a night before he surrendered so sorely against his will
and fell dead of his wounds on the deck of the Spanish flagship. It was
this, too, which, when that long seven days’ fight against the Armada
was raging and roaring up the Channel, brought the flag of the Spanish
Rear-Admiral down with a run just because the Little Pirate stamped his
foot on the deck of that same _Revenge_ and said that he was Francis
Drake and had no time to parley.
Meanwhile the rumblings of the war-storm in Europe had been growing
louder. The Netherlanders were at last turning on their torturers,
Darnley had been murdered and Mary Queen of Scots put in prison, so
Gloriana, feeling herself somewhat at leisure, took a hand in the
next buccaneering expedition. It may be noted here, by the way, that
there was no more ardent buccaneer and slave-trader in her dominions
than Good Queen Bess herself. She lent ships though she withheld her
commission, and her pirates did the rest. If disaster overtook them
or if the Spanish Minister raged against their doings she promptly
disowned them and felt sorry for her ships. But if they came back
happily filled to the hatches with plundered treasure, she took her
dividends and lent more ships.
It was thus with the expedition which sailed out of Plymouth on October
2, 1567, under the command of Admiral John Hawkins, whose second
officer was Francis Drake. The diplomacy of the times called it the
trading venture of Sir William Garrard and Co., but for all that there
were two ships of the Royal Navy in it, the _Jesus_ and the _Minion_,
and the merchandise it carried consisted mainly of cannon and small
arms, powder and shot, and cold steel.
The voyage began with a slave-raiding expedition down the Portuguese
coast of Africa, whence with five hundred slaves they crossed to the
Spanish Main. Here, after varying fortunes, they filled their ships
with treasure, and Hawkins turned his prows northward for home. But
while crossing the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico a furious hurricane
burst upon them and drove his gold-and-pearl-laden vessels so far into
it, that he came to the bold decision to put into the Spanish port of
Vera Cruz to refit.
In the harbour he found twelve great galleons loaded with gold and
silver, waiting for the convoy to escort them to Spain. They were
utterly at the mercy of the English ships, but John Hawkins, pirate
and slave-dealer, was still an English gentleman, so he made a solemn
convention to leave the treasure-ships alone on condition of being
allowed to refit in the harbour. Hawkins was already known in Spain
as the “Enemy of God,” and Don Martin Enriquez, the new Governor of
Mexico, had come out with special orders to abolish him by any means
that might be found the readiest.
Don Martin seems to have thought that in this case treachery would
suit best, so he signed the convention and gave his word of honour as
a gentleman of Spain that the English ships should be allowed to come
and go unmolested. So for three days the work of dismantling went on
in peace, and on the fourth, half-disabled as they were, they were
attacked. It was a fierce and bloody fight, and it ended in the sinking
of four galleons, the wrecking of the Spanish flag-ship, and the
killing of five or six hundred Spaniards.
But on the English side only the _Jesus_, the _Minion_, and the
_Judith_ got away and, shot-shattered and half-provisioned, began to
stagger homeward across the wide Atlantic. On the way the _Judith_ was
lost, and took to the bottom with her all the proceeds of many months
of trading and fighting and privation.
So the expedition came back poorer than it went, and Spain laughed
aloud, but, as will be seen, somewhat too soon. Drake got home first,
and no sooner did he land at Plymouth than he took horse for London.
It so happened that a little while before Spanish ships carrying a
huge amount of money to pay Alva’s army in the Netherlands, had been
driven into the Thames by the Protestant rovers lately mentioned, and
Gloriana, who never liked to let a good thing go, had held on to it on
one pretext or another until Drake came hot-footed and angry-hearted to
tell of the treachery of Vera Cruz.
Gloriana wanted nothing better. Her buccaneering venture had been a
failure and here was a way of paying herself for the two ships she
had risked, so she turned upon the Spanish Ambassador and told him
point blank that until the injury done to her “honest merchants” was
redressed she would hold the treasure in pledge. Naturally after that
not a groat of it ever got to Alva or his soldiers.
That year, which was 1569, Drake went to Rochelle with Sir Thomas
Wynter. The next summer he married Mary Newman, and a month or two
later he was again steering to the westward in two little vessels, the
_Dragon_ and the _Swan_. The next year he went again, with the _Swan_
alone, and this time he came back with a certain idea in his head which
was magnificent to the point of absurdity. The adventures of the last
two or three years had deepened his contempt for Spanish prowess, and
now he laughingly proposed to go back, not to kill the goose that laid
the King of Spain’s golden eggs, but to rifle the nest in which they
were deposited. This was Nombre de Dios, the strongest city in the New
World, and the richest to boot.
The means employed were, as was usual in this age of wonders,
ridiculously inadequate to the end to which they were devoted. Of late
years certain bold mariners have sought to win an ephemeral notoriety
by crossing the Atlantic in open boats. Francis Drake set out on a
serious and momentous expedition to the Spanish Main in the _Pasha_ of
70 tons followed by the _Swan_ of 25--that is to say in a couple of
fishing-boats. These two cockle-shells were manned by seventy-three men
all told, only one of whom had reached the age of thirty. It must have
looked more like a parcel of lads going afloat on a holiday spree than
an expedition with which all the world was soon to ring.
There is no space here to tell of all that befel these absurd
adventurers on their devious and tedious way to Nombre de Dios, though
no romancer ever imagined such a story as their adventures make. So it
must suffice to say that on July 29th he started out across the Isthmus
of Darien at the head of seventy-three men to attack a strong city as
big as Plymouth, and with these he actually fought his way into the
town, established himself in the centre of it and held it for some
hours.
[Illustration: THEY CARRIED HIM DOWN TO THE BOATS.]
If his men had been the seasoned buccaneers of his later raids he
would probably have taken it altogether, but they unhappily found in
the Governor’s house a stack of silver bars twelve feet high, ten feet
broad, and seventy feet long. This was a little too much for the nerves
of the Devon boys, but Drake would not let them touch it, since the
town was not yet theirs. Then a fearful rain-storm came on just about
dawn and put out their matches and ruined their bow-strings, and then
a terrible misfortune happened. Drake had been severely wounded in the
leg, but he had concealed his hurt until the supreme moment came, and
then, as he was leading his handful of heroes to the last attack, he
went down with his boot full of blood. Something very like a panic now
took his men, not for their own sakes but for his. In vain he stormed
at them, and cried angrily:
“I have brought you to the door of the Treasure-house of the World!
Will ye be fools enough to go away empty?”
“Your life is more precious to us and England than all the gold of the
Indies!” they replied, and so by kindly force they carried him down to
the boats and rowed away, having accomplished perhaps the most splendid
failure in history.
The fame of this exploit instantly echoed through the whole Spanish
Main and thence across the Atlantic to Europe. A few days later he
avenged his failure at Nombre de Dios by cutting a big ship out from
under the guns of Cartagena. Then he vanished, leaving no other trace
behind him than the poor little abandoned _Swan_. For the next few
months nothing was seen of him, though his hand was felt far and wide
along the coast. Spanish store-ships disappeared, dispatch boats were
intercepted, and coast-towns were raided with bewildering rapidity and
effectiveness.
But all this time the deadly tropical fever was playing havoc with his
little handful of men. His brother John died of it, and man after man
was struck down till at last, out of the seventy-three who had sailed
with him from Plymouth, he could only muster eighteen fighting men when
he at length started to plunder the mule-train from Panama.
On the fourth day of the journey a very memorable thing happened, for
that noon he reached the top of the dividing ridge of the Isthmus, and
lo! there before him, only a few miles away, lay the smooth, shining
expanse of the Pacific Ocean, that long-hidden, jealously-guarded sea
on which his were the first English eyes that had ever gazed. He did
just what such a man would have done in such circumstances. He fell on
his knees and, raising his hands to heaven, cried aloud:
“Almighty God, of Thy goodness, give me life and leave once to sail an
English ship on yonder sea!”
Years afterwards the prayer was granted, and not only did he sail on
the Golden Sea, but crossed it while he was making the first voyage
that an Englishman ever made round the world.
Were I writing a book instead of an essay I could tell of the
plundering of the mule-trains, of the taking of Vera Cruz--where, to
the astonishment of the Spaniards, he would not allow a single woman or
an unarmed man to be hurt--and Nombre de Dios, which did not resist him
so well the second time. It must, however, be enough to say that this
time everything ended happily for the remnant that survived, and that
on Sunday morning, August 9, 1573, while the good folks of Plymouth
were in church, they heard a roar of artillery from the batteries
followed by an answering salute from the sea and, straightway quitting
their devotions, they ran out to learn the good news that Gloriana’s
Little Pirate had come back safe at last and well loaded up with
plunder.
His next venture was nothing less than that famous voyage of his round
the world, with the fairy-story of which we have here nothing to do
save to say that the fame of it, no less than the enormous treasure,
the plunder of a hundred ships and a score of towns, with which the
poor sea-worn, worm-eaten, wind-weary _Golden Hind_, staggered one
Michaelmas morning into Plymouth Sound, at last convinced Queen Bess
that in her dear Little Pirate--whom, by the way, she had never yet
openly recognised--she had a champion who was worth a good many
thousands of King Philip’s soldiers and sailors.
But now the first of Drake’s open rewards was to be his. The _Golden
Hind_ was hauled on to the slips at Deptford, and Gloriana and her
court dined on board. When the dinner was over she bade her Little
Pirate kneel before her, touched him on the shoulder with his own sword
and bade him rise Sir Francis Drake. The Spaniards, by the way, had
another title for him, no less honourable in his eyes, and this was
“the Master-Thief of the New World.”
For some considerable time nothing happened beyond the failure of one
or two trifling expeditions--which failure was Gloriana’s fault, and
not Drake’s--and the setting of a price of £40,000 by favour of the
King of Spain on the Little Pirate’s head--an investment of which Drake
was soon to pay the dividend in the craft-crowded harbour of Cadiz.
Meanwhile, matters between England and Spain were going from bad to
worse. For a few months unscrupulous intrigue, backed up by wholesale
lying, hampered Drake most sorely in the preparation of that great
work which was nothing less than the establishment of the sea-power
of England. Everything that the fickleness of his mistress, the
weathercock support of so-called friends at court, and the still more
dangerous machinations of English statesmen in the pay of Spain could
do, was done. The fleet, to his unutterable rage and disgust, was
even placed on a peace-footing, despite the fact that the noise of the
Armada’s preparations was still sounding across the Narrow Seas.
But at last, by some means or other, a certain Spanish spy had got
himself suspected and stretched on the rack. Now the rack, as an aid
to cross-examination, is not an ideal instrument, but it certainly
served its purpose this time, for the spy in his torment gave away
all the details of a vast scheme which embraced an alliance between
France, Spain, and Scotland, together with a general Catholic uprising
in England, which was to take place simultaneously with the Triple
Invasion.
Never had England, and with her the cause of liberty, stood in such
great and deadly peril. Gloriana at last flung diplomatic dalliance
to the winds, stopped her lying and chicanery, kicked the Spanish
Ambassador out of the country, and let her Little Pirate loose. Yet
even now there was another lull before the storm, and this lull Philip
took advantage of to invite a fleet of English corn-ships to his ports,
where he seized them to feed that ever-growing sea-monster which he was
going to pit against El Draque.
This settled the matter. Drake, only half ready for sea, put out with
every ship that could move for fear more orders would come to stop
him and, with an insolent assurance which augured well for the great
things that he was about to do, actually ran his ships into Vigo Bay
and forced the Spanish Governor to allow him to finish his preparations
in Spanish waters. Then he turned his eager prows westward, stopping
on the way at the Cape Verde Islands to lay waste Vera Cruz and make
Santiago a heap of ashes.
Five years before young William Hawkins had been taken prisoner here
and burnt alive with several of his crew, and this was El Draque’s way
of wiping out the old score.
Then he sped on again, spent Christmas at Santa Dominica, refitted
his ships and refreshed his men, and then fell like a thunderbolt on
the famous city of Santo Domingo, the oldest in the Indies, founded
by Columbus himself and ruled over by his brother. It was this that
the Little Pirate had been preparing for during those other mysterious
voyages of his. The blow was as crushing as it was unexpected, and the
prestige of Spain in the West never recovered from it. The town was
utterly stripped and dismantled by the victors. Fifty thousand pounds
in cash, two hundred and forty guns of all calibres, and an immense
amount of other spoil was brought away, and the whole fleet, after
living at free quarters for a month, sailed southward, completely
refitted and re-victualled, as usual, at the Spaniards’ expense.
When the news got to Europe, it was said that Philip had had “such
a cooling as he had never had since he was King of Spain.” It is
both interesting and instructive to learn that not the least part of
the booty took the shape of a hundred English sailors who were found
toiling as slaves in the Spanish galleys.
Reinforced by these, Gloriana’s Little Pirate crossed the Caribbean Sea
and fell on Cartagena, the capital of the Spanish Main, and now the
richest city in the Indies. Paralysed by the insolence of the attack,
it soon fell under its fury and real strength. The booty was enormous,
but the moral effect was still greater. The new-born sea-power of
England had vindicated itself with triumphant suddenness, and Drake,
having picked up the unfortunate remnants of Raleigh’s colony in
Virginia--the time for colonising not having come yet--entered
Plymouth Sound again in the _Elizabeth Bonaventura_ at the head of his
loot-laden fleet, and reported his arrival, piously regretting that on
the way home he had missed the Spanish plate-fleet by twelve hours “for
reasons best known to God.”
“A great gap hath been opened which is very little to the King of
Spain’s liking,” was the Little Pirate’s own comment on the brilliant
achievement which had ushered a new power into the world. He might also
have put it another way, and said that with his well-directed shot
he had plugged the source whence flowed the golden stream of Spanish
wealth, for indeed it was nothing less than this. The Spanish Colossus
suddenly found itself with empty pockets, Spanish credit was ruined
at a single blow, the Bank of Seville closed its doors, and when King
Philip tried to raise a loan of half a million ducats, he was flatly
refused.
How hard hit he was may be seen from the fact that instead of hurling
the whole strength of his laboriously-prepared Armada on the English
coasts, he asked for explanations. Gloriana, with an almost splendid
mendacity, disowned her Little Pirate once more and swore she had
nothing whatever to do with him. But this Drake expected, and went on
with his own plans, having no doubt honestly paid up the Queen’s full
share of the plunder.
A few months more of diplomatic dodgery followed, and then came the
final opening of Gloriana’s eyes. A letter stolen from the Pope’s own
cabinet proved to her beyond all possibility of doubt that the Great
Armada was intended for the invasion of England and nothing else.
Then she called her Little Pirate to her again and took counsel with
him, with the result that the next time he hoisted his flag he did
so on board the great _Merchant Royal_ at the head of twenty-three
sail including five battleships, two first-class cruisers, seven
second-class, and about a dozen gunboats. Nor did he go this time as
the Queen’s licensed pirate but as her Admiral of the Fleet, duly
commissioned in her name to burn, sink, and destroy, and to use all
means whatever to prevent the various divisions of the Armada coming
together.
Even now, at the last minute of the eleventh hour, treachery almost did
its work, for there was an Opposition and Peace-at-any-price Party in
those days, as there has been in later ones. Drake seems to have known
what was coming, for, when the Queen’s messenger dashed into Plymouth
bearing the fatal orders, he had gone.
Happily there was no telegraph in those days. If there had been it
would probably have proved the ruin of England and the triumph of
Spain. As it was the next news that came was from Drake himself,
telling, laconically as usual, how he had “singed the King of Spain’s
beard in Cadiz.” When the facts came out, the said singeing was seen
to amount to the destruction by burning and sinking of 12,000 tons
of shipping, including some of the finest ships of war that floated.
The whole English fleet had, as had now become the custom on such
occasions, been revictualled at Spanish expense, and four large ships
full of provisions were captured intact.
From Cadiz the triumphant Admiral raged up and down the terror-stricken
coast, storming strongholds, and burning and scuttling the store-ships
of the Great Armada. He went to Lisbon, where Santa Cruz, said to be
the greatest sea-captain in Europe, lay, and, after vainly challenging
him to come out and fight, politely offered to convoy him and his
fleet to England “if by chance his course should lie that way.” The
fact was that the Colossus was paralysed. Drake had struck out straight
at its heart, and so doing had proved two principles of no small moment
to the making of the British Empire: first, the true frontiers of a
maritime nation are its enemies’ coasts; second, the only effective
method of defence for such a nation is attack.
It was on his way home from this expedition, storm-shattered and
disgusted at missing the Plate-Fleet, which had once more slipped
through his fingers, that Gloriana’s Little Pirate took the richest
prize of his life. This was the _San Felipe_. She was the King of
Spain’s own treasure-ship, and she came, not from the West, but from
the East. Though he knew it not, Drake had that day done a very great
thing for England and the making of her Empire, for not only did the
_San Felipe_ carry treasure and rich stuffs to the value of something
like a million and a quarter of our money, but she had on board
dispatches, letters, and account-books which let the English merchants
into all the secrets of Spain’s East Indian trade, and led to the
almost instant formation of the Honourable East India Company, itself
an Empire-Maker of no small account.
The epic of the Elizabethan era was now beginning to hurry towards its
climax. But Gloriana was still surrounded by traitors, and even now
temporising was the order of the day. She was cast down by remorse
for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, and she even reprimanded her
Little Pirate for doing her too good service, and told Philip that he
was in disgrace for exceeding instructions.
It was in vain that Drake and the other friends of England prayed
and entreated and stormed and swore. In vain they pointed across the
Narrow Seas to Parma in the Netherlands at the head of 30,000 of the
finest troops in Europe, and to the ports of Spain and Portugal, once
more swarming with shipping and echoing with the noise of warlike
preparations. For a time the liars and traitors had things their own
way again. Drake and Howard implored her to let them get their ships
fitted and go and fight the Armada in its own ports. No, she would do
nothing. And she did nothing till at last arrived that fatal evening on
which--
“There came a gallant merchant-ship full sail to Plymouth Bay.”
Golden weeks and priceless opportunities had been wasted by the fatal
lethargy of the Court. Drake and Howard, instead of falling, as they
longed to do, on the wind-bound Armada in Vigo Bay, and doing with it
as Drake had done at Cadiz, were kept on the defensive, straining like
bloodhounds at the leash, knowing that every moment that the good wind
lasted was heavily fraught with fate for England and perhaps the world.
At length the wind went round, and Drake, marvelling in angry wonder
“how God could have sent a south-west wind just then,” found himself
baffled and beaten back, while Medina-Sidonia with his released Armada
sailed triumphantly for the Channel. There was only one thing now to
do if England was to be saved. Valour and heroism, self-devotion and
skill, must repair the damage that treason, lying, and weakness of
head or heart had done. By this time the Armada should have been a
crushed and tangled mass of burning wreckage, and so it would have
been if Drake had had his way, and now here it was stronger than ever,
its ships covering the hitherto Inviolate Sea; and there was Parma,
with his transports still undestroyed, only waiting to join hands with
Sidonia to once for all strangle the Heretic in their pitiless grip.
In the mighty and memorable fight that followed, our Little Pirate
commanded on his own ship, the immortal _Revenge_. With almost
incredible labour and skill the English fleet was somehow worked and
warped out to the westward until, when that famous Sunday morning
dawned, the sun looked, as has been truly said, upon a sight glorious
for England. There was the great Armada, crescent-shaped, rolling up
the Channel, and there, right in the wind’s eye and on its rear, were
two English squadrons, and a third was gallantly advancing out of
Plymouth.
This one, with true Elizabethan insolence, steered right across the
front of the huge fleet, firing into such of the Dons as came within
range. Then it went about, and joined the other English ships to
windward.
Every one has read of the long, running, seven-day fight that followed;
every one knows how the little, light-heeled English ships ran in and
out among the great unwieldy galleons, tempting them out of their
formation, and, having isolated one, fell on her like a pack of dogs
on a wolf; and how, in spite of all that the English Admiral and his
captains could do, the ever-changing wind and the ever-succeeding calms
so helped the Spaniards, that in the end they reached the Straits of
Dover but little worse off than they started.
If Drake could have had his way, these tactics would have been pushed
farther, and every mile of the way would have been disputed; but Lord
Howard, though a brave man, lacked the all-daring assurance of the
conqueror of Santo Domingo and Cartagena. He would not fight until he
had joined with Seymour and Wynter in the Straits. So it came about
that on the seventh day--that is to say, Saturday afternoon--the Great
Armada, the poorer only by some dozen craft that had been captured
or battered into wreck and ruin, was sailing gloriously past Calais
with the French and English land well in sight, and Dunkirk, the
trysting-place with Parma, only eighteen miles away.
England has never passed through such anxious hours as she did that
afternoon and night. It seemed as though, after all, her new-found
sea-strength had failed her, and that, despite all the brilliant
exploits of Gloriana’s Little Pirate in the West, he was powerless
to protect her nearer home. What would have happened in the ordinary
course of events no one now knows, for the Spaniards, stricken by some
inexplicable madness, suddenly altered the whole course of events by
what can only be called a freak of idiocy.
Medina-Sidonia, after having accomplished the most brilliant feat of
seamanship that his age had seen, gave orders for the Armada to anchor!
A few hours more and its work would have been done, with what results
to England one scarcely cares to picture. So unexpected was this piece
of priceless good fortune by the English captains that they had to drop
their own anchors within range of the Spanish guns to save entangling
themselves with the big Spanish ships.
All Sunday the two fleets lay within sight of each other; anxious
councils of war were held on both sides, and so night fell without a
shot being fired or anything done. By midnight the tide was swirling
strong and swift from the English to the Spanish ships, and Drake was
busy preparing his crowning piece of devilry for the edification of the
Dons.
At about one o’clock on that calm, moonless morning, patches of
flickering, leaping flame began to show among the twinkling English
lights, and these grew swiftly higher and broader, and a few minutes
later the terrified Dons saw eight fire-ships crowned mast-high with
leaping flames, come reeling and roaring into their midst.
Then there was cutting of cables and slipping of moorings, and
labouring with frantic haste to get the ships under sail. Galleon
crashed into galleasse, and galleasse into cruiser in the wild haste
and fatal confusion.
Marvellous to say, not a single Spanish ship took fire, but behind
the fire-craft there was something more terrible and deadly still--El
Draque and his guns. At the supreme moment Lord Howard weakly and
foolishly turned aside to capture or sink a disabled galleasse. If the
rest of the fleet had followed him there might have been no Battle of
Gravelines, and the Trafalgar of the Sixteenth Century might never have
been fought. But, as has been well said, it was the hour for which
Francis Drake had been born. He set the _Revenge_ on the wind, and,
followed by the rest of the squadron, bore down in grim and ominous
silence on the huddled, entangled Dons. Within pistol range of the
great _San Martin_ the _Revenge_ burst into sudden thunder and flame,
and drove on enwreathed in smoke. In her wake ship after ship came
on in perfect order, each raining her iron storm into the rent and
splintering sides of the Dons as they passed.
Then from Dover way came the roar of guns telling that Wynter and
Seymour had got to work, and so for three hours they went at it, the
Little Pirate ever first, and revelling in the work that he loved to
do for his dear England. He had forgotten all his mistress’s slights
and fickleness, all the harm that Court traitors had done him, all his
suffering and privation on the windless seas and burning lands of the
West. It was the hour of England’s fate and his own, and there he was
in the thick of it, and he was happy.
After three hours Howard and his laggards came up, and the fight roared
on flank and front and rear. Although the school-books say but little
about it, there had never been such a sea-fight in the world before,
nor one on whose end such great issues hung. The Spaniards, caught
between El Draque and the sands of Dunkirk--which to them was something
worse than being between the devil and the deep sea--fought with all
their ancient valour, but ship after ship, as the battle roared on
through the day, went down riddled with shot or took fire and blew up,
till at length out of the forty battleships and cruisers which Sidonia
had somehow got together to protect his rear, only sixteen were left,
and they were little better than shot-shattered, fire-blackened hulks.
The powder on both sides was nearly done, but so too was the work of
Drake and his ships. Fathom by fathom the north-west wind was driving
the Dons on to the mud-banks of the Netherland shore, and the Little
Pirate in his well-named _Revenge_ was hanging on their weather quarter
watching--and I doubt not praying--for the moment of their final ruin.
And yet he was not to see it, for when there was but five fathoms of
water between the Spanish keels and the Dutch mud the north-wester
dropped to a calm, a fresh south-wester sprang up in its place, and
for the fourth time in seven days the Armada was saved from utter
destruction by those fickle winds to which a pious sentiment has
ascribed its ruin.
Down went the Spanish helms, and round came the dripping, labouring,
Spanish prows, and ere long all that was left of King Philip’s fleet
was staggering away to the northward to begin that awful voyage round
the north of Scotland and past the wild Irish coast from which so few
were to return. Meanwhile the Little Pirate hung on to the heels of the
flying Armada for two days and nights, until at length a tempest came
rolling up over the Dogger Bank, and he ran in for safety under the
Scottish shore, cheerfully leaving the Dons to the winds of heaven, and
the rocks that were waiting to finish what his own guns had begun.
With the victory of Gravelines, Drake’s work as an Empire-maker comes
to an end. The expedition to Portugal, for all its booty, was a failure
and did nothing to enhance his fame. If his advice had been taken
Spain might have been crushed and humbled for ever, but such was
the hopeless weakness and vacillation at Court that, even after the
Armada had shown her the true designs of Philip, Gloriana got into
negotiations with him again. Over and over again her Little Pirate
besought her to give him the means of striking the blow that should
crush Spain and make England undisputed mistress of the seas, but it
was not to be, and so at length, sick and sore at heart, he sailed away
again to his beloved West, never to return.
There is nothing in this last expedition of his that is noteworthy
save its continued misfortunes. It seemed as though when the little
_Revenge_ went down, as she did in the midst of the fifty-three Spanish
ships which she had fought “for a day and a night,” she had taken her
old commander’s good luck down with her. At last on the deadly island
of Escudo de Veragua the two guardian demons of El Dorado, fever and
dysentry, struck him down with many another of his men. He lived to get
away, but not for long, and six days afterwards, when his fleet came to
anchor off Puerto Bello, the heroic Little Pirate breathed his last and
his gallant soul went to its account, passing away from earth on the
very spot that had been the scene of his first sea-fight and his first
victory.
IV
_OLIVER CROMWELL_
“_HEALER AND SETTLER_”
IV
OLIVER CROMWELL
“He is perhaps the only example which history affords of one man having
governed the most opposite events and proved sufficient for the most
various destinies.”
No man’s character was ever so completely and so tersely summed up as
the great Oliver’s is here in these few words of a critic belonging
to another race and nation, and, as regards his varied destinies, it
may be added that no man ever was raised up and set to work by the
Controller of human destinies as opportunely as he was.
History shows no parallel to it, not even in the oft-quoted story of
Cincinnatus, and certainly in all the long array of our rulers there
is none other whose story is so crammed with wonders or who crowded so
many notable and pregnant acts into the busy days of a few years as
this gentleman-farmer of Huntingdonshire, who at forty-three left his
farming and vestry-meetings and the like and girded on his sword to go
and fight the good fight of freedom, and who at fifty-two laid it aside
to prove himself as good a statesman and ruler as he had been soldier
and general.
His claim to a foremost place among the Makers of Britain is a twofold
one, for he was a restorer, a reinvigorator, as it were, of this realm,
as well as a very considerable widener of it. When the futile and
inglorious reign of “the most learned fool in Christendom” came to an
end, all the brilliant promise of the Elizabethan age had been wofully
obscured, and the glories of the great Queen and her pirates looked
like those of a summer sun setting behind a bank of fog.
As Macaulay justly put the case: “On the day of the accession of James
I. England descended from the rank which she had hitherto held and
began to be regarded as a Power hardly of the second order.... He
began his administration by putting an end to the war which had raged
many years between England and Spain, and from that time he shunned
hostilities with a caution which was proof against the insults of his
neighbours and the clamour of his subjects.”
How different this from the gallant days of Gloriana and her knights!
And yet this poor crowned and sceptred ninny aspired to be a despot
even as his son after him did. It is true that these realms were
beginning to need a despot and that badly, but not such a one as could
ever have been born of that hopeless House of Stuart. A despot who is
a strong man may be good or evil as he uses his opportunities and his
powers, but the whole stage of history has not yet held a despot who
was also a weak man who did not prove himself at once a curse to his
country and the world.
The story of the feeble violence and silly cunning with which Charles
the First sought to enforce that ridiculous theory of his about the
Divine Right of Kings has been too often and too variously told for us
to need to trouble with it here. There _is_ a Divine Right of Kings, as
the great Oliver was very soon to show with most unmistakable and most
unanswerable logic, but the kind of king who really has Divine rights
does not usually have them because he is the son of his father, and
especially of such a father as James the First of England and Sixth of
Scotland.
Our present concern is with the fact that this Empire of ours, in a
most critical state of its process of making which came very near to
one of unmaking, was saved and transformed from weakness to strength by
the substitution of the real despotism of the Lord Protector from the
sham or histrionic despotism of Charles the First.
The fact was that the body-corporate of this infant empire was assailed
by the worst of all national disorders, internal disintegration.
England, the very heart and centre of it, was about to be rent in twain
by the frenzied and pitiless talons of civil war, and that is a war in
which the right side--which, of course, is always the best side--must
not only win, but utterly crush and pulverise the other unless wreck
and chaos irretrievable are to follow.
This was the central idea that the Great Oliver grasped just as Edward
of the Long Legs had grasped his brilliantly premature idea of the
United Kingdom. He was the latest of that series of iron-handed men
that had begun with William the Norman. The watchword of his whole
public life was “healing and settling.” The wounds of his country had
to be healed and its disorders settled, no matter by what means, so
long as it was done, and in this deep-rooted conviction we see at a
glance his kinship with the other Empire-makers who had gone before him.
Of his early life there is little to be said, though it is noteworthy
that he was once fined £10 for neglecting a summons to appear at the
King’s coronation and receive the honour of knighthood. He little
thought then that he would one day find it his duty to refuse the crown
and sceptre of England.
Every one who has read even the school-books knows that when the
war actually began all the apparent advantages were on the side of
the Royalists. Though the first battles afforded the extraordinary
spectacle of mere conflicts of amateur soldiers, few of whom had ever
seen a real fight before, the Cavaliers, trained to horsemanship and
the use of arms, and versed in all manly sports, made far finer
fighting material than the raw levies of the Parliament. Had this
difference continued victory must have remained, as it began, with the
Royalists, with results to the nation that could hardly have failed to
be of the very worst sort. This is what Cromwell himself says on this
all-important subject:
“At my first going out into this engagement I saw our men were beaten
at every hand. Your troops, said I, are most of them old, decayed
serving-men, and tapsters and such kind of fellows, and, said I, their
troops are gentlemen’s sons, younger sons and persons of quality. Do
you think that the spirits of such base, mean fellows will ever be able
to encounter gentlemen that have honour and courage and resolution in
them? You must get men of spirit and, take it not ill what I say--I
know you will not--of a spirit that is likely to go on as far as
gentlemen will go, or else you will be beaten still.”
These wise words, which, by the way, were said to no less a man than
John Hampden himself, form a key to all the battles of the Civil
War. No sooner did Oliver come on to the field as a plain captain of
yeomanry horse than his keen, if untaught, eye instantly recognised the
one great virtue and strength of the Royalist party. They had an Idea,
a devotion, a principle for the sake of which men were ready to sell
their lands, melt their plate, beggar their families, and lose their
own lives, and men so equipped could only be successfully met and
withstood by men who, as he himself put it in that quaintly eloquent
phraseology of his, “made some conscience of what they did,” and
thereupon he set himself to find such men and make soldiers of them.
How well he succeeded the following extract from a contemporary
news-letter written some ten months after the outbreak of war will
sufficiently tell:
“As for Colonel Cromwell”--promotion, it will be seen, was somewhat
rapid in those stormy days--“he hath two thousand brave men, well
disciplined. No man swears but he pays his twelve pence. If he be drunk
he is set in the stocks, or worse. If one calls the other Roundhead he
is cashiered; insomuch that the countries where they come leap for joy
of them and come in and join with them. How happy it were if all the
forces were thus disciplined!”
On the field of Marston Moor, Prince Rupert nicknamed Cromwell “Old
Ironsides,” and from that day to this the most invincible troops that
ever marched to battle have been named after him. Years afterwards,
when his work and theirs was done, their leader was able to say of
them: “From that day forward they were never beaten and wherever they
were engaged against the enemy they beat continually.”
This is literally true. Whether in skirmish or battle, at home or
abroad, whether pitted against the disorderly chivalry of the Loyalists
or the rigid discipline of the finest Continental troops; whether
storming a breach or bearing the brunt of a half-lost battle, these
psalm-singing, hard-hitting Crusaders of the new Church Militant not
only were never beaten, but never once failed to hurl the enemy back in
confusion and disaster.
In them, in short, that stubborn English valour which has since pushed
its way all over the world was first _disciplined_. They formed the
first model ever seen of an English regiment, a combination of many
units of strength and valour moving and fighting as one, and the fact
that “Old Ironsides” was the first man thus to add discipline to valour
is in itself no small portion of his title to fame as an Empire-Maker.
The first occasion on which these Ironsides made their mark in battle
is one of even greater importance than the battle itself, for it
marks the entrance on to the stage of history of the first regularly
disciplined English regiment, the parent of those who, on a thousand
fields since then, have proved themselves worthy of their grim but
splendid ancestors. It was the first time, too, that they had a chance
to try conclusions with Rupert and his Cavaliers, hitherto unconquered
and irresistible.
It was July 2, 1644, on a dull and storm-threatening afternoon, that
Cavalier and Roundhead first met in a really serious fashion. Compared
with what was now to be done Edgehill and all that had come after it
had been trifles, for so far the conflicts had been those of amateurs
at the art of war, each engaged, as it were, in licking the other into
shape, and the conclusion that they now had to try was which of them
had got into the best shape. There were about four-and-twenty thousand
each of them as they stood through the anxious hours of that summer
afternoon on either side of a ditch running across Marston Moor, each
watching for a chance to attack, but feeling, no doubt, that the doings
of the next few hours would decide an issue which needed a certain
amount of thinking over.
The two armies were drawn up upon what is now the regulation pattern,
right and left wings and centre. Cromwell with his Ironsides on the
left of the Parliamentary army faced Rupert on the right of the
Royalists, and he was supported by the infantry of what was then known
as the Eastern Association. The King’s centre was held by Newcastle,
and against it was the Parliamentary centre reinforced by nine thousand
Scots infantry. The Royal left wing was composed of Goring’s cavalry
regiments and was faced by the Parliamentary right wing under the two
Fairfaxes.
During the afternoon there was an exchange of cannon shots which
doesn’t seem to have done very much harm on either side. Prince Rupert,
with his usual impetuosity, had been for some hours wanting to get
over the ditch and try conclusions with the Ironsides, who were posted
on a little eminence amidst standing corn, and who had wiled away the
anxious hours of waiting with mutual exhortations and psalm singing,
not a little to the amusement of Rupert and his gallant scapegraces,
who were yet to learn that these close-cropped, grim-visaged Puritans
could ride and fight a great deal better than they could sing.
The King’s older generals, no doubt contemplating Continental
etiquette, had decided that it was too late to fight that evening and
had withdrawn to their quarters. Cromwell, laughing at etiquette as
he did at everything else that was not of practical utility, saw his
chance, jumped the ditch, and went hot-footed and hot-handed into
Rupert’s ranks. A bullet scored his neck, and hearing some one cry
out that he was wounded he shouted: “All’s well. A miss is as good as
a mile!” and charged on. Whether or not he was the first to use this
now favourite expression I am not able to say, but at least it was
characteristic.
The charge was met in a fashion worthy of Rupert and the gallant
gentlemen who followed him, and we learn that after the first onset the
Ironsides reeled back, but it was only for a moment. Some Scots cavalry
came up behind them, they surged forward again, discipline and valour
did their work, and a few minutes afterwards Prince Rupert and his
merry men had met more than their match, and, ere long, to use his own
words, Colonel Cromwell “had scattered them before him like a little
dust.” The remnants of them were chased and cut down with a ruthless
severity which was then part of the Puritan character, almost to the
gates of York, eight miles away.
But Cromwell, profiting by the mistakes which Rupert himself had made
in his headlong charges, kept his men well in hand, and when once the
Royalist right wing was broken, led them round to see how the battle
had gone on the Parliamentary right and centre.
If he had not done so Marston Moor might have replaced Charles Stuart
on the throne of England. Goring had broken up Fairfax’s cavalry as
completely as Oliver had broken up Rupert’s. He had flung them back
upon their infantry supports, breaking these in turn, after which he
flung himself with the seemingly triumphant Royalists of the centre on
the Scots Infantry, taking them in flank and almost routing them, too.
Only three regiments of them out of nine held their ground, the rest
had broken and fled, and the Earl of Leven, their leader, was already
making the best of his way towards Leeds.
The battle at this moment presented one of the strangest spectacles
in the history of warfare. On the one side Prince Rupert with his
broken brigades was flying towards the North, on the other Leven
and Manchester and Fairfax, believing the day hopelessly lost, were
making equal haste towards the South. Such was the juncture at
which the Man of Destiny arrived. He was in command of the only really
disciplined force on the field.
[Illustration: HE SWOOPED WITH HIS CAVALRY ROUND THE REAR OF THE KING’S
ARMY.]
Mr. Frederic Harrison, in his excellent monograph on Cromwell, thus
graphically describes what happened: “In an hour the genius of Cromwell
had changed disaster into victory. Launching the Scotch troopers of
his own wing against Newcastle’s Whitecoats, and the infantry of the
Eastern Association to succour the remnants of the Scots in the centre,
he swooped with the bulk of his own cavalry round the rear of the
King’s army, and fell upon Goring’s victorious troopers on the opposite
side of the field. Taking them in the rear, all disordered as they
were in the chase and the plunder, he utterly crushed and dispersed
them. Having thus with his own squadron annihilated the cavalry of the
enemy’s both wings, he closed round upon the Royalist centre, and there
the Whitecoats and the remnants of the King’s infantry were cut to
pieces almost to a man.”
Such was Marston Moor, and how completely it was the work of the one
man of destiny may be seen in the fact that, complete and crushing as
the victory was, its advantages were almost entirely negatived by the
incapacity and imbecility of the Parliamentary leaders in the West and
South. Every one of any consequence wanted to be supreme leader; no
one had either definite plans or the capacity to carry them through;
and when at last there was a prospect of bringing matters to an issue
on the field of Newberry, the Royalist forces, though half-beaten,
were allowed to get away with all their guns, stores, and ammunition
in spite of the fact that Manchester was in command of a very superior
force.
This was as good as a defeat for the forces of the Parliament, for it
was the cause of dividing their councils. Manchester and those who
sided with him had apparently begun to fear the terrible earnestness of
the Captain of the Ironsides, and were for making peace with the King
and patching matters up somehow. But Cromwell, with deeper insight, saw
that the quarrel had now gone too far and that it could not stop till
one side or the other had had a thorough and decisive beating, and that
side he was fully determined should be the King’s.
The dispute ended in the fall of Manchester and the triumph of
Cromwell. Then came the reorganisation of the Parliamentary forces
under what was at this time the New Model, and this New Model, be it
noted, was the first standing army of professional soldiers that the
United Kingdom had ever seen. Its nominal Commander-in-Chief was Sir
Thomas Fairfax, but its master spirit and guiding genius was Oliver
Cromwell.
But meanwhile the tide of Royalism had been on the rise again, sweeping
up from the West and South. The armies faced each other on the borders
of Leicestershire, but Cromwell was not there. Fairfax, no doubt
knowing his own weakness, entreated that he might come and command the
horse. He came, and then, as Clarendon pathetically remarks, “the evil
genius of the Kingdom in a moment shifted the whole scene,” and it is
related that when, after rumours had been for some days flying through
both armies as to his arrival, “Old Ironsides” at last came upon the
field of action, all the cavalry of the Parliament raised a great shout
of joy.
The battle that he came to fight was Naseby, and, saving for the
superior discipline displayed on both sides, almost exactly the same
things happened as at Marston Moor. Cromwell this time commanded on
the right wing, but Rupert was placed at the Royalist’s right, and
was therefore opposed, not to Cromwell, but to Ireton, his son-in-law
and second self. Once more the left wing of the Parliament was broken
and scattered by the furious charge of the gallant Cavaliers, once
more the centre under Fairfax was “sore overpressed” and thrown into
confusion, and once more Cromwell and his Ironsides, having ridden
down everything that opposed them, swung round behind the rear of the
victorious Royalists, swooped in a hurricane of irresistible valour and
determination on their flanks and rear, turned defeat into victory, and
snatched triumph out of disaster.
It is true that even then there seemed so great a chance of the
Royalists retrieving the day that Charles, who had put himself at the
head of the flower of his cavalry, had thought himself warranted in
crying: “One charge more, gentlemen, and the days is ours!” But while
he was thinking about this, Cromwell, Fairfax, and Ireton had, by the
exercise of almost superhuman energy, reformed the whole of their army,
horse, foot, and artillery, into complete battle-array on a new front,
and against this the fiery valour of the Cavaliers dashed itself in
vain.
Once more valour with generalship had conquered valour without it. The
defeat was utter and crushing. For fourteen long miles the pursuit
went on and only stayed when the walls of Leicester were in sight. The
King’s army was utterly destroyed and he himself never again appeared
at the head of a force in the field.
During the twelve months that followed we see the erstwhile Farmer of
Huntingdon in a new light as the besieger and reducer of strong places.
His methods were logical, effective and, we may fairly add, pitiless.
Those days were not these any more than William the Norman’s or Edward
Longlegs’ were Cromwell’s, and moreover we must remember that he had
set himself with all the strength of his mighty nature to stamping the
plague of civil war out of the Three Kingdoms with such dispatch as
was possible, and it had got to be done speedily, for outside were the
enemies of Britain waiting to take advantage of the weakness that this
plague might leave her with.
First he summons the stronghold to surrender, threatening all with
the sword. If this is refused he selects his point of attack, batters
away at it till he makes a practicable breach, then he gives another
chance of surrender, this time with somewhat better terms, but this is
the last grace. Refusal now means wave after wave of his irresistible
iron and leather-clad soldiery pouring into the breach, till at last
all opposition is beaten down and then massacre--for which, it may be
added, he and those with him are never at a loss to find a biblical
precedent.
The victories that he won by this method were simply amazing. In about
sixteen months he was engaged in some sixty battles and sieges, and
took fifty fortified towns and cities with over a thousand pieces
of artillery, forty thousand stand of arms, and between two and
three hundred colours. The end of this wonderful campaign was the
Storm of Bristol. This happened on the 10th and 11th of September,
1646. As a feat of warfare it is almost incredible. The second city
in the kingdom, defended by properly constructed earthworks and
fortifications, and garrisoned by four thousand troops with a hundred
and fifty pieces of cannon, was stormed and taken with a loss of under
two hundred men!
It reads more like one of Drake’s insolently valiant attacks upon a
Spanish treasure-city than a desperate conflict between Englishmen
and Englishmen. There can only be one explanation of it, and that
explanation is summed up in the two words: Oliver Cromwell. We are
bound to grant that the valour was equal on both sides, but equally we
are forced to admit that all the genius and generalship were on one.
Looked at from our point of view, there were terrible blemishes on
these triumphs. Every advantage was pursued with the unsparing ferocity
which was possible only to religious bigotry fired to a white heat. It
is only reasonable to suppose that these Puritan champions of the new
faith were fired with just the same furious and pitiless zeal as that
which inspired the Israelites in their attack on Canaan, or the first
armies of Islam in their assaults on the idolaters of the East. They
slew and spared not, they hewed their enemies in pieces as Samuel hewed
Agag “before the Lord,” and they honestly believed that the Lord looked
down with approval on them and their bloody work.
Priceless treasures of art were destroyed, not only without remorse,
but with grim exultation. To them they were abominations of the
heathen, just as the Canaanite idols of silver and gold were to the
armies of Israel. But however ferociously it was done, the work was
done thoroughly, and by August, 1646, the fall of Ragland Castle
following on the surrender of Oxford, brought down the curtain on the
first act of the Civil War. Charles gave himself up to the Scots at
Newark, and Oliver turned to fight the enemies of his own household.
The chief of these enemies, curiously enough, was that same Parliament
in whose name he had won all his brilliant triumphs, and a conflict,
very interesting to the student of humanity, now began between the Man
of Action and one of those Talking Machines which the good Earl Simon
some four centuries before had found so singularly ineffective.
There is no need to tell in detail how the struggle went. Every
one knows how Cromwell preached and prayed and stormed at the
self-sufficient busybodies who thought themselves a power in the land
because they called themselves a parliament. Then, seeing that no other
method would stop their gabble, he brought in his soldiers and turned
them out to talk in the streets or wherever else they could get any one
to listen to them, while he went on with his work.
It is not very many years since Thomas Carlyle, who perhaps understood
Cromwell better than any other man not living in his own age, was
walking over Westminster Bridge with a very distinguished British
officer one night when the Mother of Parliaments was busy tearing her
hair and rending her garments over some wordy futility or other, and,
jerking his thumb towards the lighted windows, he said: “Ah, my lord,
I should like to see the good day when you would go in there with a
file of Grenadiers as old Noll did with his dragoons and clear that
nest of cacklers out. Maybe the nation would get some of its business
_done_ then instead of only getting it talked about.”
From this there is a certain moral to be drawn by the wise. For my own
part I should dearly love to know with what words old Noll himself
would have answered the Sage of Chelsea.
The payment of the Scots’ arrears by the Parliament, their surrender
of the king--who, by the way, was a great deal stronger in helpless
captivity than he had ever been at the head of an army--and his seizure
by Cromwell through the instrumentality of Cornet Joyce and his troop
of horse, now led up to a very singular situation. Cromwell, the
conqueror, went over to the side of Charles Stuart the captive, and
if it had not been for that fatal twist in the king’s moral nature,
there is no telling but that he might have been re-seated on a throne
supported and surrounded by the pikes and sabres of the Ironsides.
But unhappily for him, it was not in Charles Stuart’s nature to “go
straight,” and, in the end, after Cromwell had faced and quelled a
mutiny among his own men on his account, he discovered that the king
was playing him false, that he did not honestly wish to follow his
policy of “healing and settling,” but only to regain his freedom and
try the hazard of battle again.
From that moment Cromwell was his unsparing enemy. Now he saw in
Charles “The Man of Blood” who, for the sake of a personal aspiration
and for personal profit, was eager to once more set his subjects by the
ears and light the flame of war from end to end of the country.
West and South and North the Loyalists were arming and rising again
and the Scots were marching across the Border, so the Man of Destiny
stopped talking and preaching, buckled on his sword and strode out to
battle once more.
The first rising was in Wales, and that he crushed as promptly as he
did pitilessly. Then he turned with a weary and war-worn army of some
seven thousand men, so wasted with marching and privation and sickness
that, as a record of the time tells us, “they seemed rather fit for a
hospital than a battle,” to face the invading Scots in the North.
He met them at Preston. They were three to one--or rather, to be more
exact, twenty-four thousand to seven thousand--well armed and found and
confident of victory. Yet never did the military genius of the great
Oliver shine out more brilliantly than now. What followed was not a
battle; it was an onset, a chase, and a massacre which lasted three
days and extended over some thirty miles of country. When it was over
Cromwell wrote in one of those marvellous dispatches of his: “We have
quite tired our horses in pursuit of the enemy. We have killed and
disabled all their foot and left them only some horse. If my horse
could but trot after them I would take them all.”
The next act in the swiftly-moving drama was the trial and execution of
him who to this day is considered by some to have been a royal martyr,
who only exchanged an earthly for a heavenly crown, and by others is
looked upon as the man who deliberately made himself guilty of the
worst of all blood-guiltiness, the guilt of civil war. That is a matter
for each one to decide according to his own convictions, which, be it
noted, some two and a half centuries of argument have not yet altered.
Here we are only concerned with Cromwell’s share in it.
There can be no doubt to an unbiassed mind that at one period he
honestly tried for a monarchical settlement of the difficulty. It
is equally undeniable that he considered Charles’s double-dealing
responsible for what he held to be the unpardonable crime of the Second
Civil War and therefore as having incurred for a second time the guilt
of blood. That the execution, or murder, of the king met with his
entire approval cannot be doubted, since before it happened he said to
Algernon Sidney: “I tell you we will cut off his head with the crown
upon it.”
So, whether crime or act of justice, it was done, and Cromwell, perhaps
more than any one else, was responsible for it.
The next act is the Dictatorship, and the first scene in it the
re-conquest of Ireland, with its massacres and bitter, pitiless
persecutions in revenge or punishment, as you will, for other massacres
which had gone before. It is a piteous story, and one of no great
credit to any one, but, to borrow the maxim of Strafford, the former
tyrant of Ireland, it was “thorough.” In nine months, with about
fifteen thousand men, the Dictator had stamped the Irish rebellion out
and made “the curse of Cromwell” a phrase that will dwell on Hibernian
lips for many a generation.
But no sooner was the Irish revolt drowned in blood and flame than
Prince Charles, afterwards Charles II. of infamous memory, took the
Oath to the Covenant, and the Scots rose to support him. Cromwell
crossed the Border on July 22, 1650.
As it happened, the Scottish general was Leslie, the old comrade who
had fought at his side at Marston Moor. For some weeks the Scots played
a waiting game, and Cromwell, with his men wearied and falling sick,
and with no other base than his ships on the coast, hurled texts and
biblical harangues at the enemy. In fact, as Mr. Harrison cleverly puts
it, “it was not so much a battle between two armies as between two
rival congregations in arms.”
Leslie and his preachers fired other texts back at him and kept out of
his way until the fatal 3rd of September came. By this time Cromwell
had only eleven thousand men capable of bearing arms, and they were in
no great state for fighting. Leslie had twenty-two or three thousand
Scots and all the advantage of the position, but the Fates had already
taken the matter into their own hands. On the afternoon of the 2nd,
Cromwell saw that the wary Scot, as some say, driven by the frantic
exhortation of the preachers, had forsaken his post of vantage. “The
Lord hath delivered them into our hands!” he cried, and straightway
began to set his battle in order.
The next morning, while it was yet moonlight, they came to blows.
In an hour or so it was all over. The Scots fled in utter panic and
confusion, “being made by the Lord of Hosts as stubble to our swords,”
to use Oliver’s own words. When the rout was at its height the sun
rose, scattering the morning mists. “Let God arise and His enemies be
scattered!” he shouted exultantly through the roar of the battle, and
then--how characteristic it was of the man!--he halted his army in the
very moment of triumph and sang the one hundred and seventeenth psalm,
beginning: “O praise the Lord all ye people, for His merciful kindness
is great towards us!” Then he unleashed his bloodhounds again, and the
rest was massacre.
[Illustration: HE HALTED HIS ARMY ... AND SANG THE HUNDRED AND
SEVENTEENTH PSALM.]
Another year passed in miscellaneous fighting and arguing, slaughter
and psalm-singing, and once more the sun of the 3rd of September,
Cromwell’s Day of Fate, or, as Byron puts it:
“His day of double victory and death,”
dawned, this time over Worcester, the scene of “the Crowning Mercy.”
The same miracles of generalship were accomplished, the same tremendous
victory was won at a ridiculously small expense--under two hundred men
to conquer an entrenched army of fifteen thousand--and this was the end
of the fighting at home.
But meanwhile there was fighting abroad, and, more than that, the fame
of the great Oliver and his marvellous doings had been ringing from
end to end of Europe. As Clarendon, the historian of the Royalists,
candidly admits: “His greatness at home was but a shadow of the glory
he had abroad.” The mastery of the seas was wrenched out of the hands
of the Dutch by Blake, the sea-power of England was organised as its
land-power was, and Britain rose at a bound from the degradation to
which she had sunk under the first Stuart to the proud position of the
first naval and military Power of the world, and the greatest ministers
and monarchs in Europe, even the Pope himself, were forced to respect
the prowess and cringe for the friendship of the Farmer of Huntingdon.
If, as has been aptly suggested, the great Oliver could have lived to
an age which is now a normal one for statesmen, the disgraceful and
ruinous interval occupied by the reigns of the second Charles and the
second James might have been spared with all their infamy and national
loss, and William of Orange might worthily have continued the work
which Cromwell so well began. But the time was not yet, and so it was
not to be. The great ideal of his life, a Protestant Alliance, was
never realised. His last days were days of darkness and suffering,
social, mental, and physical.
Once more the Day of Fate came round, and between three and four in
the afternoon the watchers by his bedside heard him sigh deeply and
heavily. Some say that he whispered: “My work is done!”--and then he
died. This may be fact or fancy, but, be that as it may, no man had a
better right to pass out of the mystery of the things that are into the
mystery of the things that are to be with such words on his lips than
Oliver Cromwell, General, Statesman, and King in everything but the
empty name.
V
_WILLIAM OF ORANGE_,
_OVERCOMER OF DIFFICULTIES_
V
WILLIAM OF ORANGE
It is perhaps one of the most curious facts of our history that the
Empire-Maker who, as it were, finally completed the work begun by his
namesake William the Norman, should, like him, have been a foreigner,
should have sprung from similar ancestry, and should have been his
exact reverse in every mental and physical quality save one--an
inflexible determination to do the work which he was appointed to do in
spite of every conceivable kind of obstacle.
It is noteworthy also that this man should have come from those same
Low Countries from whose shores our Saxon ancestors had first come
on their plundering forays to do their share of the work of making
the English people. The ancestry of the great-grandson of William
the Silent stretched far back, probably even into those remote and
turbulent times, and it is within the limits of possibility that some
stalwart ancestor of the ancient House of Nassau may himself have had
something to do in the early making of that Realm, over which, a
thousand years later, his descendant was to rule during one of the most
critical and perilous periods of its existence.
Be that, however, as it may, the central fact which stands out in the
story of William III. is this: Whatever his country or ancestry, he
was, so far as we have any means of judging, the one man in the world
just then who could have accomplished the difficult and, as it must
often have seemed even to him, almost impossible task which had to be
performed if the work of the other Empire-Makers who had gone before
him was not to be sadly marred, if not altogether undone.
William of Orange may perhaps be most truthfully described as an
overcomer of difficulties. Probably no other man ever had so many
difficulties to conquer as he had, and his triumph over them is one of
the finest examples of irresistible will-power and purely intellectual
force that all history has to show. Mentally he was a giant, and as
such he acquitted himself in what was undoubtedly a battle of giants
fighting for the spoils of Europe. Physically he was a miserable
weakling, shattered by disease, seldom free from bodily pain, and
foredoomed from his youth by an exhausting and incurable malady.
Yet even his sports and pastimes were those, not only of a healthy,
but even of a robust constitution. His pale, sickly, small-pox-pitted
face never flushed save under the stimulus of battle or the chase. He
fought his fight with Fate and won it by sheer intellectual strength,
yet none of the pleasures of intellect were his. He knew nothing of
science, little of literature, and less of art.
Apparently fitted by Nature only for the pursuits of the study, he
found his rare moments of real happiness when riding down a stag or a
boar in the forests of Windsor or the woods of Flanders, or, sword in
hand, leading his men wherever the battle was hottest or the danger the
greatest. A creature of contradictions, in short, determined to make
himself that which Nature had seemingly _not_ made him, and to do that
which he appeared least fitted to do.
No one possessing an intelligent grasp of the deplorable state of
affairs which obtained in England, and the threatening aspect of
matters on the Continent during the last decade but one of the
seventeenth century, would have guessed for a moment that this
“asthmatic skeleton,” as Macaulay somewhat roughly describes his
hero, was the man to turn England’s weakness into strength, and even
in defeat to grapple successfully with the colossal Power which was
threatening the liberties of Europe.
In England the weakness and baseness of the two last Stuart kings had
more than undone the work of the great Oliver. He had, as has been
shown, made England one of the first Powers in the world, strong at
home and respected and even courted abroad. Charles II. had sold his
country, or at any rate his own independence and what should have been
his royal honour, to France. He had, in fact, exhibited to the world
the disgraceful spectacle of an English king who was the pensioner of a
foreign monarch.
The for-ever infamous Treaty of Dover had brought the prestige of
England to its lowest ebb. For the first time in nearly seven hundred
years the Isle Inviolate had been seriously threatened with invasion,
and London, for the first time since it had been a city, had heard the
sound of hostile guns. Now this of itself, taking the whole history of
these islands into consideration, is a fact of absolutely unparalleled
infamy, and yet if such infamy could have been equalled, the brother
and successor of Charles II. would have done so. Indeed, from one point
of view it may be said that he excelled it.
The guns of William’s countrymen were heard in the Thames because
Charles II., having his brother James for Lord High Admiral, had so
scandalously wasted the funds which should have been devoted to the
maintenance of the Navy that no adequate defence was really possible;
but it was left for James II., the last and most contemptible, if not
in all respects the worst king of the royal and miserable House of
Stuart, to be the only British monarch who ever brought a foreign army
on to British soil for the purpose of coercing by force the will of
the British people. More than this, too, it must be remembered that
these foreign troops were Frenchmen supported by renegade English,
Irish, or Scotsmen who had deliberately deserted their own country to
serve under the standard of a man who was to the seventeenth century
what Phillip II. of Spain had been to the sixteenth.
So low, then, had Britain sunk in the scale of nations when William of
Orange made his entry upon the stage of British history. The fact which
made his entry possible is hardly of the sort that would commend itself
to people of a romantic turn of mind, although few romances have been
really more romantic than his own life-story.
He could never have become King of England, nor is it likely that he
could even have been asked to constitute himself the protector of
English liberties, had it not been for the fact that he was married
to the daughter of James II., and of this marriage Lord Macaulay
truly says: “His choice had been determined chiefly by political
considerations, nor did it seem likely that any strong affection would
grow up between a handsome girl of sixteen, well-disposed, indeed, and
naturally intelligent, but ignorant and simple, and a bridegroom who,
though he had not completed his twenty-eighth year, was in constitution
older than her father; whose manner was chilling, and whose head was
constantly occupied by public business or by field sports.”
His marriage was, in short, “a marriage of convenience,” and yet, in
defiance of all the rules that are supposed to govern the most intimate
of all human relationships, it was one of the best and, in the end,
most devoted unions that history has to record. It is hardly possible
to doubt that William of Orange married Mary Stuart because he saw
with that keenly penetrating foresight of his that such a union would
strengthen him in his life-long combat with the arch-enemy of his
faith, his family, and his nation; and this enemy was that same Louis
of France who had made Charles II. his pensioner, and was soon to make
James II. his dependent.
To quote Lord Macaulay again: “He saved England, it is true, but he
never loved her, and he never obtained her love.... Whatever patriotic
feeling he had was for Holland ... yet even his affection for the
land of his birth was subordinate to another feeling which early
became supreme in his soul, which mixed itself with all his passions
and compelled him to marvellous enterprises, which supported him
when sinking under mortification, pain, sickness, and sorrow ... and
continued to animate him even while the prayer for the departing was
read at his bedside.”
It was this hatred of France and her king which nerved him to do for
the liberties of Europe and Great Britain what Francis Drake had done
for England against Philip of Spain, and in the doing of this he won
the conspicuous glory of forcing the paymaster of the two English
sovereigns whom he succeeded, to make peace with him on equal terms;
and this, too, although he lost more battles than he won, and had to
surrender more strong cities than he took.
It is comparatively easy for a conqueror to take triumph out of
victory, but it is a higher quality which patiently endures defeat and
confronts disaster, and by sheer genius wins triumph in the end. This
is what William of Orange did, and it is from this fact that he derives
his title to be ranked among the Makers of that Empire to whose throne
he came as an alien, and whose honour he restored and upheld, as one
might say, in spite of herself.
So far as England is concerned, the male line of Stuart came in with
a fool and went out with a coward. One does not even care to imagine
what would have happened if James II. had remained on the throne; or if
William of Orange, with his hereditary and deep-rooted hatred of Louis
XIV. and his policy, had not come to take his most miserably-vacated
place in the nick of time.
The sentimentality which makes such a fuss about loyalty to persons as
distinguished from loyalty to country, and the lawyer-quibbles which
occupied men’s minds in the dispute as to whether James II. was King
_de facto_ or _de jure_, or both, of the country from which he had run
away like an absconding debtor, may be dismissed, just as Harold the
Saxon’s claims had been some six hundred years before. It is merely a
question of the Fit and the Unfit, and James was Unfit.
James Stuart deserted his post as ruler of these realms because he
found himself assailed by difficulties which the most ordinary ability
ought to have overcome. William assumed the same position in the face
of difficulties which only the highest qualities of kingcraft and
statesmanship could have enabled him to successfully grapple with. In
a word, James possessed no ideal that qualified him to be a king, much
less an Empire-Maker. William _did_ possess such an ideal, and that is
the only reason why he became King of England, _vice_ James Stuart,
absconded.
Next, perhaps, to Henry VII., William was the most business-like
sovereign who has occupied the British throne. With him all men
and things, all beliefs and sentiments, were subordinated to the
achievement of the one great end--the curbing of the power of France,
and consequently the furtherance of political and theological liberty
in Europe. He was, in fact, only incidentally an Empire-Maker, although
without him and without the broad and firm basis of popular liberty and
national strength which he laid down, as it were, in the doing of his
greater work, the building up of the Imperial fabric would undoubtedly
have been long delayed and seriously impeded.
He got himself made King of Great Britain and Ireland, not because he
wanted to occupy the throne, but because from that eminence he would be
able to look the Grand Monarch more equally in the face.
We get a luminous insight into the character of the man in his reply to
the Convention or conference of the two Houses of Parliament which had
proposed that his wife as actual and lawful heir to the throne which
her father had forsaken, should occupy it as queen, and that he should
reign by her authority as a sort of Royal Executive.
“My lords and gentlemen,” he said, “no man can esteem a woman more than
I do the Princess, but I am so made that I cannot think of holding
anything by apron-strings, nor can I think it reasonable to have any
share in the government unless it be put in my own person, and that for
the term of my life. If you think fit to settle it otherwise I will
not oppose you, but will go back to Holland and meddle no more in your
affairs.”
That was the kind of man William of Orange was. He had come to be a
king, and a king he would be or nothing. And so king he was, and it
was not very long before he was to show how well his self-confidence
was justified. He had scarcely seated himself on the throne before the
Parliament, recognising the fact that his work was something other than
merely filling James’s place, deliberately suggested that he should
resume as King of England the hostilities which he had begun against
Louis as Stadtholder of the Netherlands, and he on his part showed how
ready he was to take up the task by exclaiming, in one of his rare
bursts of exultation, after reading the address:
“This is the first day of my reign!”
This address, however, welcome as it was, was somewhat belated. For
more than a month before it was presented, Louis, under the pretence of
helping the runaway, whom for his own purposes he affected to believe
still lawful King of England, had committed the gravest of all acts of
war, and James had crowned the disgrace of his flight by the infamy of
heading an invasion of British territory by foreign mercenaries. On the
12th of March, 1689, he landed at Kinsale as enemy and invader of his
own country, convoyed by fifteen French men-of-war, and supported by
2,500 French troops.
The story of this Irish war needs no re-telling here, save in so far
as it brings out the contrast between William and James as the Fit and
the Unfit for the doing of that work which had just then got to be done
if England was not to sink back to the degrading position of a French
dependency, and if the way of future progress and Imperial expansion
was to be left open. William no sooner saw that the scene of the fight
for constitutional liberty and religious freedom had shifted for the
time being from the Low Countries to Ireland than he sent Marshal
Schomberg, who was then one of the most skilful soldiers in Europe,
with an army of sixteen thousand men to the scene of action.
Meanwhile the heroically stubborn resistance which has won immortal
fame for the men of Londonderry had proved, not only to James and his
foreign mercenaries, but to Louis himself and all Europe, that the
struggle which was just then renewed was no mere war of dynasties,
and that something very much greater than the mere question as to who
should be king of England had got to be decided before the trouble was
over.
James in Ireland and Louis in France stood for the already discredited
and exploded doctrine of the divine right of kings to rule as they
pleased because they were the sons of their fathers; for the dark
tyranny of Rome, now almost equally discredited; and for the domination
of Europe by the French autocracy. In Holland and England and Germany
William and his allies stood for the very reverse of all this, so that
it was not only the destinies of the United Kingdom, but those of the
greater part of the civilised world that had to be decided, and it was
by procuring through mingled victory and defeat, confronted by powerful
enemies abroad and by conspiracy and threatened assassination at home,
that the worthy descendant of William the Silent proved his real right
divine as king of these realms and champion of those principles of
which the British Empire of to-day is the concrete expression.
It was really on the shores of an insignificant Irish stream that
William fought and won the battle of European liberty. But before he
did this he had another battle to fight, as it were, in front of his
newly-given throne.
His reign, unhappily, saw the commencement of that system of government
which an intelligent Chinese Minister to the Court of St. James’ once
described as “the election of one party to do the business of the
nation, and of another to stop them doing it.” In other words, it was
William’s fate, among all his other difficulties, to have to contend
with the bitter and usually dishonest strife of Parliamentary parties,
and so keen did this strife become after the foreign enemy had actually
landed on British soil, that he was even then on the point of throwing
up the whole business in disgust, and going back to Holland to fight
his battles out there.
What would have happened if he had done so is anything but a pleasant
subject for speculation. Happily, at the eleventh hour he refused to
acknowledge himself beaten. Sick of the strife of words and longing for
the reality of deeds, he announced his intention to place himself at
the head of the English forces in Ireland, “and with the blessing of
God Almighty endeavour to reduce that kingdom that it may no longer be
a charge to this.”
In this we may see more than the expression of a pious hope. As
statesman and soldier William had seen that Ireland was the back-door
of Great Britain, and that so long as it remained open so long would
the whole kingdom be vulnerable to foreign invasion, and so he went to
close it.
It was a strange position for any man to be placed in. He was going
to fight for everything that he held dear. He knew that if he lost in
Ireland he must lose also in England and the Netherlands, but he was
also going to fight against the father of the woman whom he had now
come to love so dearly that her death, when it happened, came nearer to
wrecking his imperial intellect than all the other trials and troubles
of his laborious and almost joyless life. He had no feeling of personal
enmity against James as he had against Louis, and it was duty, and duty
alone, which took him to the Irish war. Almost the last words that he
said to his wife concerning the enemy whom he was about to meet on the
battlefield were:
“God send that no harm may come to him!”
Mr. Traill has thus tersely summed up the condition of affairs at this
moment: “Ireland in the hands of a hostile army, the shores of England
threatened by a hostile fleet, a dangerous conspiracy only detected on
the eve of success, a formidable insurrection imminent in the country
he was leaving behind him....”
And yet, gloomy as the outlook seemed, his spirits rose as they ever
did when he saw the moment for doing instead of talking draw near,
and Bishop Burnett tells us that he said to him on the eve of his
departure: “As for me, but for one thing I should enjoy the prospect
of being on horseback and under canvas again, for I am sure that I am
fitter to direct a campaign than to manage your Houses of Lords and
Commons.”
These words were well worthy of the man who, not many days later,
quietly sat down to breakfast in the open air beside Boyne Water,
within full sight of the enemy and within easy range of their guns.
Breakfast over, he mounted his horse and was promptly fired at. The
first shot from two field-pieces which had been trained on him and his
staff killed a man and two horses. The second grazed his shoulder and
made him reel in his saddle.
“There was no need for any bullet to come nearer than that!” was his
remark on the occurrence. Certainly not many bullets have ever come
nearer to changing the history of Britain, and therefore of the British
Empire, than that one.
[Illustration: MADE HIM REEL IN HIS SADDLE.]
After the wound had been dressed, instead of taking the rest which
a good many strong men would have taken, this consumptive and
asthmatic invalid re-mounted his horse and remained until nightfall
in the saddle, making his dispositions for the battle of the morrow,
and attending to every detail himself. His prudent uncle and
father-in-law, apparently bent on fulfilling William’s pious wish, was
meanwhile taking very good care to keep himself out of harm’s way.
[Illustration: “MEN OF ENNISKILLEN, WHAT WILL YOU DO FOR ME?” HE CRIED.]
The battle itself, which, as every one knows, was fought on the 1st of
July, brought out with startling clearness the contrast between the
man who was king in his own right and the man who called himself king
because his name was James Stuart.
“Men of Enniskillen, what will you do for me?” he cried at the critical
moment of the fight, when Caillemot and Schomberg, his two best
captains, had been killed, and he, drawing his sword and swinging it
aloft with his wounded arm, led his trusty Dutch guards and Ulstermen
against the Irish centre. James, meanwhile, having watched the first
part of the fight on which all his fortunes depended from the safe
eminence of the Hill of Donore, had already given up for lost the
day which he had done nothing to win, and was making the best of
his way to Dublin, whence, in due course, leaving the beaten and
demoralised rabble that had once been his army to its fate, he fled
to the congenial ignominy of his safe retreat at St. Germain, and the
fostering care of his country’s worst enemy.
The Battle of the Boyne not only settled the fate of the Stuart
dynasty for good; it decided the question whether this country was to
be ruled by a feeble despotism under the patronage of France, or by
that constitutional monarchy under which Great Britain has so worthily
proved her title to be called the Mother of Free Nations, and in
winning this battle and deciding this all-important question, William
of Orange won the right to be counted among the wisest and strongest
of our Empire-Makers. The disgusted Irishmen, too, had some reason on
their side when they said to the victors after the battle: “Change
leaders, and we’ll fight you again!”
The story of his wars in those countries which have been aptly termed
the cockpit of Europe is the story of the continuation of that work
which he came to England to do; not, as has already been pointed out,
for England as a country, but for the establishment of those principles
for which the British Constitution, of which he was one of the makers,
stands. Ignorant or prejudiced critics have accused him of sacrificing
English blood and treasure to the furtherance of his own ambition. The
fact is that he employed them upon the best and most necessary work
that there was for them to do just then.
“Look at my brave English!” he said to the Elector of Bavaria one
day during the siege of Namur, while a British regiment was carrying
the outworks on one side of the city. But they were doing more than
carrying earthworks. They were fighting for the principles which their
descendants crowned with everlasting glory at Trafalgar and Waterloo.
They were showing the soldiers and generals of France, then held to
be the best in the world, the sort of stuff that they were made of,
and giving promise of future prowess that was soon to be splendidly
redeemed at Blenheim and Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet.
It was a singular war, and by all the rules of warfare the issue should
have been the reverse of what it was. But again and again William’s
wonderful genius and indomitable persistence snatched victory out of
defeat, and turned disaster into advantage, until at last the Grand
Monarch himself had to confess the power of the enemy whom he had once
thought so insignificant, and the signing of the Treaty of Ryswick left
William triumphant if somewhat dissatisfied.
The results would no doubt have been much greater if William could have
had his own way, and if the strife of parties in the British Parliament
had not so sorely crippled him. But at least he had the satisfaction
of knowing before he died that, whereas a few months before the French
men-of-war had with impunity insulted and threatened the English
coasts, and landed a small army on Irish soil, a few months afterwards
every invader had been driven from British ground, and the French fleet
almost destroyed, while the Mediterranean, on which British ships
had sailed only by sufferance, was now well on the way to becoming a
British lake.
And yet, in spite of all the triumphs that he had won over so many
difficulties and so many dangers, and in spite of the consciousness of
work well and nobly, if quietly and unostentatiously, done, William’s
last days, like those of many another man who has deserved well of the
world, were full of sorrow and suffering.
The death of his now adored queen had so shaken his mighty nature that
for some days his reason was despaired of, and there can be no doubt
but that it hastened his own end. And yet, weak and far advanced in
disease as he was when he went out for that fatal ride from Kensington
to Hampton Court, he was even then going a-hunting. The brutal Jacobite
toast: “To the little gentleman in black velvet who works underground!”
still serves to remind us of the mole-hill over which his horse
stumbled and fell, breaking his rider’s collar-bone, and inflicting the
death-wound which he had escaped on a score of battle-fields.
His death was worthy of his life, for it was the death of a brave,
patient man and a Christian gentleman. No doubt he himself would have
preferred to have died at the head of a charge, or in the thick of an
assault on a French fortress, but his destiny ordered it otherwise,
and the man who had a hundred times faced death in the most reckless
fashion for the purpose of inspiring his followers with his own courage
and enthusiasm, died quietly in his bed, leaving behind him the
greatest work ever done by an individual British sovereign, and a fame
which, but for the one dark and inexplicable blot of Glencoe, is as
fairly entitled to be called spotless as that of any man who ever sat
upon a throne and accomplished great things with such means as came to
his hand.
VI
_JAMES COOK_,
_CIRCUMNAVIGATOR_
VI
JAMES COOK
Once more I am going to ask you to take your seat with me on the ideal
equivalent of the Magic Carpet and skim across another time-gulf some
half-century wide. This time we alight on the morning of Monday, July
5, 1742, before the door of a double-fronted shop, one side of which is
devoted to the sale of groceries and the other to the drapery business.
This shop is situated in a little village on the Yorkshire coast a few
miles from Whitby, Staithes, or more exactly The Staithes, so called
from the local name for a pier or sea-wall of wood jutting out a few
feet into the German Ocean, and built partly to protect the little bay
from the North Sea rollers and partly to afford accommodation for the
fishing-boats and colliers.
The shop belongs to a substantial citizen of Staithes named Saunderson,
and this morning Mr. Saunderson is a very angry man. In fact, if we go
into the shop, which is not yet open, we shall find him with a cane
or some similar weapon in his hand, leaning behind the counter and
hitting blindly at a bed there is beneath it, shouting the while sundry
excellent maxims on the virtue of early rising, especially modified for
the benefit of apprentices.
But no response comes from the bed, and Mr. Saunderson stoops down to
make closer investigation. The bed is empty, and the fact dawns on him
that his last apprentice has followed the example of all the others
and run away to sea. It was a very common event on the Yorkshire coast
in those days, but this particular running away was destined to be a
very memorable one for the world, for the lad who, instead of being
in the bed under the counter, was just then striding rapidly away
over the fields to Whitby with one extra shirt and a jack-knife for
his sole possessions, was James Cook, a name as dear to the lovers of
the romance of travel and adventure as Robinson Crusoe, and one of
infinitely more importance in the annals of mankind.
In following his fortunes, so far as the brief limits of such a
sketch as this will permit, we shall bid a perhaps welcome adieu for
a while to the roar of guns and the shock of battle, to the blaze of
burning towns and the fierce cries ringing along the decks of captured
treasure-ships, to watch the contest of a clear head and a strong will
against those foes which may be overcome without bloodshed, although
not always without loss of life--the hidden dangers of unknown oceans
strewn with uncharted reefs and shoals lying in wait for unwary keels,
the sudden hurricanes of the Tropics, and the storms and fogs and the
floating ice-navies of the far North and South. It was these that
Captain Cook went out to fight and overcome, and in doing so to prove
eloquently that:
“Peace hath her victories no less renowned than war.”
Nevertheless there are certain points of likeness between James Cook,
Geographer and Circumnavigator, and that other Circumnavigator, Francis
Drake, Pirate and Scourge of Spain. Both began life as ship-boys,
and both rose, by sheer ability and strength of purpose, far above
their original station in life to positions of command in the service
of their country. Both were men of iron will, far-reaching design,
unshakeable self-reliance, and passionate temper, and, lastly, both
were possessed by that irresistible spirit of roving and adventure
which, when it once seizes a man, but seldom lets him rest in peace. In
short, though the vocation of one was piracy and war, and that of the
other the peaceful, but none the less adventurous service of science,
both were stamped with the supreme and essential characteristics of the
Empire-Maker.
Naturally, the world had changed a good deal by the time James Cook
started out to add so enormously to men’s knowledge of it. Spain had
fallen from her high estate and was living in slothful ease on the
dregs and lees of that strong wine which she had drunk to intoxication
in the golden days of Cortez and Pizarro. But Britain, no longer only
England, had become Great Britain, and was fast expanding into Greater
Britain. Cowley, Dampier, Clapperton and Anson had circumnavigated the
globe more than once, and people were beginning to have something like
a definite notion of how very big a place was this world which now
seems so small to us. The Imperial Idea was beginning to take hold of
men’s minds. They wanted to know, not so much how big the world was,
but what other unknown lands might be lying waiting for the discoverer,
hidden away among the vast expanses which were still an utter blank
upon the map.
The maritime nations of the world, too, and Britain, now foremost among
them, had unconsciously taken a very great stride along the pathway of
real progress, and they were beginning to grasp the higher ideal of
colonisation as distinguished from mere conquest, and to James Cook
belongs the high honour, if not of discovering, at least of first
definitely locating and in part mapping out the greatest of all the
British colonies.
Indeed, it may be said that, in sober fact, he added a whole continent
to the British Empire, and that without the striking of a single blow
or the loss of a single life in battle.
The first few years of James Cook’s seafaring life were eventless,
just as Francis Drake’s were, but for all that he, like Gloriana’s
Little Pirate, was doing that minor but no less essential part of his
life-work which was the necessary preparation for the greater. He was
doing his work first as ship’s boy, then as sailor before the mast,
then as second mate, first mate, and so on up the laborious ladder
which was to lead him in the end to an unequalled eminence among
mariners.
Thus for thirteen years he served what may be called his apprenticeship
to his life’s work; learning in the most practical of all schools,
a North Sea collier of the eighteenth century, not only the science
of seamanship in all its details, but also what was hardly less
important--that science of taking things as they came, of looking upon
hardship, privation and danger as the commonplaces of a seaman’s life,
incidents in his day’s work, as it were, and as such scarcely worth
even the mention, and hence much less worth troubling about.
A curiously instructive fact strikes one in contrasting Captain Cook’s
own account of his voyages with those of others, such as Anderson and
Gilbert, who sailed with him. They expatiate largely on the miseries
of heat and cold, ice and mist, the almost uneatable character of the
sea-fare of those days, disease among the crew, and so on; but Captain
Cook hardly ever mentions them, saving only the scurvy, of which more
hereafter.
But there was something else that James Cook had already learnt long
ago while he was yet a boy. When he was a lad of six or seven he had
been set to work on a farm belonging to a man named William Walker,
and this William had a wife named Mary who, taking a fancy to the lad,
taught him his letters and encouraged him to read, and so, without
knowing it, put into his hands the talisman which was to win his way to
future greatness. She not only aroused in him that passion for reading
which distinguished him among the sailors of his time, but she gave him
what might have been the only means of gratifying it, for not every
farm-lad and ship’s-boy of the middle of the eighteenth century had
learnt, or ever did learn, to read and write.
It may have been that James Cook’s latent ambition had never looked
beyond the possibility of becoming master of one of the vessels of
which he had been mate, and it is also possible that he might never in
reality have been anything more, but it so happened that his ship, the
_Friendship_, was lying in London river in May, 1756, and that at the
same time the war with France, which had been brewing for a year, broke
out.
As usual the Press Gang set instantly to work, and now came Cook’s
chance. He was mate of a ship, albeit only a collier brig; still he
was a thorough seaman, an excellent navigator, and, more than that, he
seems to have known something of the theory as well as the practice of
his science. These accomplishments, however, did not put him beyond the
reach of the Press Gang.
Now, in those days there were two ranks of seamen before the mast in
the King’s navy--the pressed man, who might be anything from a raw
land-lubber to an escaped convict, and the volunteer, who was probably
and usually a good sailor, if not something better, as Cook was, and
he, guided either by inspiration or deliberate resolve, eluded the
Press Gang by offering himself as a volunteer, and so in due course
took his rating as able-seaman before the mast on board his Majesty’s
frigate _Eagle_, of sixty guns, of which shortly afterwards the good
genius of his life, Sir Hugh Palliser, was appointed captain.
During the next four years there was fighting, but we have no record
of any share that Cook took in it. What we do know is that by the time
he was thirty he had risen to the rank of master of the _Mercury_, a
King’s ship which went with the fleet to the St. Lawrence at a very
critical juncture in British colonial history.
So far it would appear that he had worked himself up by sheer ability
and industry, but now his chance was to come. The river St. Lawrence at
that time had never been surveyed, and it was absolutely necessary that
soundings should be taken and the river correctly charted before the
fleet could go in and with its guns cover Wolfe’s attack on Quebec.
The all-important work was entrusted to the master of the _Mercury_,
and although the river was swarming with the canoes of hostile Indians
in the service of the French, and though he had to do his work at
night, he did it so thoroughly that not only did the fleet go in and
out again with perfect safety, but the work has needed but little
re-doing from that day to this.
Thus did James Cook, not as sailor or fighting-man, but as good mariner
and skilful workman play his first part as Empire-Maker, and in an
unostentatious fashion contribute his share towards the capture of
Quebec and the acquisition of one of the widest and fairest portions of
Greater Britain.
He was at this time, as has been said, only thirty. As regards the
outer aspect of the man he stood something over six feet, spare, hard,
and active. His face was a good one and suited to the man, broad
forehead, bright, brown, well-set eyes, yet rather small, a long,
well-shaped nose with good nostrils, a firm mouth, and full, strong
chin.
In short, his best portraits show you just the kind of man you would
expect Captain Cook to be. For the rest he was a man of iron frame,
tireless at work, resting only when it was a physical necessity, with
few friends and fewer confidants, cool of judgment save during his rare
and deplorable fits of passion, self-contained and self-reliant--just
such a sea-king, in short, as we may imagine Heaven to have
commissioned to carry the British flag three times round the world and
to the uttermost parts of the known earth, and to plant it on lands
which until then no white man’s eye had seen or foot had trodden.
In the same year Cook was promoted from the _Mercury_ to the
_Northumberland_, the Admiral’s flag-ship, and in her he came back
to England, and at St. Margaret’s Church, Barking, married Elizabeth
Batts, a young lady of great beauty and of social standing far above
that of the grocer’s apprentice and collier’s knockabout boy, but not
above that of the Master of a King’s ship. His married life lasted
some seventeen years, and of these he spent a little over four in the
enjoyment of the delights of home.
For the next four years or so he was regularly employed in surveying
and exploring work off the Atlantic coast of America, and this
of itself shows that he had already made his mark in his chosen
profession. But much greater things were now to be in store for him. It
will be remembered how Drake, when he first saw the smooth waters of
the Pacific, prayed God that He would give him life and leave to sail
an English ship on its waters. That prayer had been granted, and his
and many another English ship had crossed the great Sea of the South.
Meanwhile the realised dream of El Dorado had been replaced in men’s
minds by another, even more vast, shadowy, and splendid. This was the
dream of the Great Southern Continent, and in this imagination revelled
and ran riot. Grave scientists, too, demonstrated beyond all doubt that
there must be such a land far away to the south since how, without it
as a counterpoise to the continents of the north, was the rolling world
to be kept in equilibrium?
So they took it for granted, laid it down upon the maps, and wrote
glowing descriptions of the varieties of climate, the splendour of
scenery, the wealth of treasures and the strange peoples and animals
that it must of necessity contain. Above all, it would be a new El
Dorado which would not be under the control of Spain.
What more could men want, unless indeed it was the actual discovery of
the Terra Incognita Australis? This was the new world of which Cook was
to be the Columbus. Others had seen parts of it just as others had seen
parts of America before the great Genoese reached the West Indies, but
he was the man who was to do the work of putting its existence beyond
all doubt.
The Royal Society found that there would be a transit of Venus in the
year 1769, and that it would be best observed from some point in the
great Southern Ocean, say Amsterdam Island or the Marquesas Group,
lately discovered by the Dutch and Portuguese, and as the result of
representations made to the King, an expedition was set on foot to
carry out suitable persons to observe it. Of this expedition James
Cook, raised from the rank of master to that of lieutenant, was placed
in command. On his own recommendation the ship chosen for the purpose
was the _Endeavour_, a Whitby-built craft of 370 tons, broad of bow and
stern and fairly light of draft, and built for strength and endurance
rather than speed.
She sailed, carrying a complement all told of eighty-five men, from
Plymouth on August 26, 1768, which as Cook’s latest biographer happily
remarks, was a Friday, and the starting-day of what was, all things
considered, the most successful voyage of discovery ever made. Just
before she sailed Captain Wallace had come back bringing the news of
the discovery of Otaheite, otherwise known as Tahiti, and as this
island was considered a more favourable position, Captain Cook, as we
may now fairly call him, was ordered to proceed there first.
It is of course utterly out of the question to attempt any connected
account even of one voyage round the world, let alone three, within
such limits as these, therefore I cannot do better than let the great
navigator describe his achievements, as he actually did, in three
modest paragraphs:
“I endeavoured to make a direct course to Otaheite” (this was after
he had crossed the Atlantic and doubled the Horn, which doubling, by
the way, took thirty-three days), “and in part succeeded, but I made
no discovery till I got within the Tropic, where I fell in with Lagoon
Island, The Groups, Verde Island, Chain Island, and on the 13th of
April arrived at Otaheite, where I remained three months, during which
time the observations on the transit were taken.
“I then left it, discovered and visited the Society Islands and
Ohetoroa; thence proceeded to the south till I arrived in latitude
40°22 south, longitude 147°29 east, then on the 6th of October, fell in
with the east side of New Zealand.
“I continued exploring the coast of this country till the 31st of
March, 1770, when I quitted it and proceeded to New Holland; and
having surveyed the eastern coast of that vast country, which part had
never before been visited, I passed between its northern extremity and
New Guinea, and landed on the latter, touched at the island of Savu,
Batavia, Cape of Good Hope, and St. Helena, and arrived in England on
the 2nd of July, 1771.”
I have seldom come across such a masterpiece of eloquent simplicity as
this, but then, of course, Cook’s voyages were made before the days
of the lecture-exploiter and the Age of Booms. There is, however, one
remark that may be made on it. What Cook calls New Holland we call
Australia, and Botany Bay, the first point he touched at, is hard by
Port Jackson, on the flowery shores of which now stands the lovely
capital of New South Wales. Terra Incognita Australis was unknown no
longer, but the days when it was to prove itself even more golden than
El Dorado were yet distant nearly a hundred years.
If you would read the marvellous tale of frozen lands and seas, of the
sunlit coral-islands gemming the sparkling waters as thickly as the
stars stud the Heavens, of the delights of Paradise and the terrors
of Nifflheim told and written by sundry members of this expedition
after their return, you must go to your library and find them in the
originals, for there is no space to give them here. Suffice it to say
that, though somewhat prolix and diffuse, you will, if you are blessed
with an intelligent taste for that kind of thing, find them more
delightful reading than any of the countless romances whose writers
have taken their materials out of them.
But there is one circumstance which for the honour of James Cook ought
to be mentioned. The curse of sea-voyaging in those days was scurvy.
Out of forty sick, nearly half of the little company, no fewer than
twenty-three died, and this terrible fact set the captain thinking,
with the result that he, first of all mariners, grappled with and
conquered this worst of the dangers of the ocean. If he had never done
anything else he would have deserved a niche in the Temple of Fame. In
his second voyage round the world, which lasted three years and sixteen
days, he only lost four men, three of whom died by accident and the
fourth not of scurvy.
The Circumnavigator was now promoted to the rank of Commander, a
modest enough reward for the achievement of the greatest work of his
generation. He remained ashore just a year, probably the longest period
he had ever spent on land since he first went to sea.
During this time the publication of a collection of travels started
people talking about the Southern Continent again. Captain Cook had
found it, but that didn’t matter. His discovery was not splendid enough
by any means, so it was decided to send another expedition, this time
of two ships, “to complete the discovery of the southern hemisphere”
(!) and Cook sailed again in command aboard the _Resolution_ of 462
tons having for consort the _Adventure_ of 336 tons.
They sailed on July 13, 1772, and on October 30th reached Table Bay--a
hundred and nine days, think of that, you who take a run out to the
Cape and back again for a winter holiday! Truly the world was somewhat
larger in those days.
From Cape Town they steered straight away for the South, and on
December 10th they sighted for the first time the ice-fringe of what we
know now to be the _true_ Terra Incognita Australis.
The landsmen on board seem to have had a dreadful time during this part
of the voyage and Foster, one of the naturalists of the expedition,
bewails “the gloomy uniformity with which they had slowly passed dull
hours, days and months in this desolate part of the world.” What a
change it must have been from the rigours and horrors of Antarctica to
the paradisaical delights of Tahiti, which, after surveying the coast
of New Zealand and deciding that it consisted of two islands and not
one, the expedition reached on the 16th of the following August.
There is perhaps no other spot on earth which so completely fulfils
one’s ideas of what Paradise ought to be as this same island of
Tahiti even now, but what must it have been in those days, when white
men first saw it in all the beauty and simplicity of its primeval
innocence. Now, alas, it is very different, cursed by the diseases and
vices of civilisation and afflicted by a cast-iron _régime_ which the
people seem to think a little worse than death, since they are dying as
fast as they can to get away from it.
After this again New Zealand was visited, and once more the two ships
plunged into the icy solitudes of Antarctica, only to return again,
baffled by the impenetrable ice-wall. From here the ships steered
northwards for Easter Island and Crusoe’s Island. It is noteworthy
that on the way Captain Cook, the great Medicine Man of the sailors,
himself fell sick, and that, for want of anything better, “a dog was
killed to make soup for him”--from which it will be seen that voyages
of discovery were not exactly picnics in his time.
From Juan Fernandez he steered for the Marquesas again, once more
visited New Zealand, and once more his sea-worn crews revelled in the
unrestrained delights of Tahiti. Then again to the south, this time
not to rest until the whole circle of the Southern hemisphere had been
made without the finding of any other southern continent than the
unapproachable Antarctica, and so in due course and without mishap
came the Sunday morning, July 30, 1775, when the _Resolution_ and the
_Adventure_, having well vindicated their names, dropped their willing
anchors into the waters of Spithead.
More honours, though not of the nineteenth-century-boom order, were
now most justly bestowed on the Circumnavigator. He was promoted to
the rank of Post-Captain in the Navy, and made a Captain of Greenwich
Hospital, a post which carried with it a home and honourable retirement
for the rest of his life--of which he was the very last man in the
world to avail himself. He was also elected Fellow of the Royal
Society, and presented with the gold medal for his treatment of scurvy.
Captain Cook as sailor, as scientific navigator, and as explorer was
now at the height of his fame. He was forty-eight years old, and had
spent thirty-four years at sea, and it is no exaggeration to say
that during this time he had added more geographical knowledge to
the history of the world than any one had ever done before, and had
probably covered a larger portion of its surface. He had at once proved
and disproved the dream of the Southern Continent, and, potentially
speaking, he had added enormous areas to the ever-growing realms of
Greater Britain.
He might well have rested on such laurels as these, but there was more
work for him to do, and he went to do it. One of the greatest questions
of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, was the
possibility of the North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
So far every attempt had ended in failure, and generally in disaster,
but now, when men’s minds were full of the wonders Captain Cook had
achieved, there arose another question: Might not a _North-East_
passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic be possible, and, if so, who
better to try it than the great Circumnavigator? An expedition was
promptly decided on. Captain Cook was not offered the command, as the
Government probably and rightly thought he had won his laurels. But
one fatal evening he dined with Lord Sandwich, the promoter of the
expedition, and at table he met his old patron, Sir Hugh Palliser, and
his friend, Mr. Stephens, Secretary to the Admiralty. Ostensibly the
object of the dinner was to consult him as to the best leader for the
new venture, but the moment the subject was broached the unquenchable
passion for travel blazed up again, and the great Navigator rose to his
feet and said gravely:
“My lord and gentlemen, if you will have me I will go myself.”
So was decided the fatal voyage which was destined to end a glorious
and almost blameless career by an ignoble and unworthy death.
The expedition consisted of the old _Resolution_ and the _Discovery_,
a vessel of three hundred tons. The voyage lasted four years and nine
months, but the loss of life by sickness was only five men, of whom
three were ill when they started. A good deal of the old ground was
gone over, more islands were discovered, more unknown coasts surveyed.
Fair Tahiti was visited once more, and the expedition, so far as its
principal object was concerned, came to an end, as the search for the
Southern Continent had done, in a way blocked by impenetrable barriers
of ice--this time the ice of the North.
Thus turned back, they steered southward, and on December 1, 1778,
they discovered Hawai, which discovery the great Navigator in his last
written words somewhat strangely says, “seemed in many respects to be
the most important that had hitherto been made by Europeans throughout
the extent of the Pacific Ocean.”
It was here, as all the world knows, that he met his death, and the
story of it is, unhappily, at sad variance with that of his life.
The one blemish on Captain Cook’s otherwise noble character was a
liability to outbursts of ungovernable temper, and during these he
seems to have behaved on more occasions than one in a manner almost
befitting one of the old buccaneers. For instance, he would punish
paltry thefts by cutting off the ears of the islanders, firing small
shot at them as they swam to the shore, chasing them in boats, and
ordering his men to strike and stab them with boat-hooks as they
struggled out of the way. On one occasion he punished a Kanaka who had
pilfered some trifle by “making two cuts upon his arm to the bone, one
across and the other close below his shoulder.”
Again, at the island of Eimeo, because a goat was stolen, he landed
thirty-five armed men, blockaded the island with armed boats, and burnt
every house and canoe that he came across, and, as an eye-witness
says, “several women and old men still remained by the houses, whose
lamentations were very great, but all their tears and entreaties could
not move Captain Cook to desist in the smallest degree from those cruel
ravages.”
Now it was undoubtedly this anger-madness of his, combined with an
equally incomprehensible act of duplicity, which cost him his life.
When he returned from his attempt to find the North-East passage and
landed at Hawai, he was hailed by the natives as Lono, a god who had
disappeared ages before, saying that he would return in huge canoes
with cocoa-nut trees for masts. Now unhappily there is no doubt that
Captain Cook, for some reason or other, took advantage of this belief.
Not only did he not undeceive the natives, but he permitted divine
honours to be paid to him.
From personal knowledge of the Pacific Islanders I am able to say that
in their pristine state they look upon deception and lying as the
gravest of crimes, and usually punish them with death, and Captain
Cook, with his vast experience of them, must have known this also,
and therefore he must have been fully aware that the moment anything
happened to show the natives that he was _not_ a god, his life would
not be worth a moment’s purchase.
Shortly after this the ships sailed, and it would have been well for
Cook, who had been guilty of some very high-handed acts, if he had
never returned. But they came back a week afterwards to find the
island under the mysterious _tabu_--which is the Kanaka equivalent
for an interdict, and by far the most sacred institution known to the
Polynesians. Some of his marines broke this _tabu_ in the most flagrant
fashion. In revenge one of the _Discovery’s_ cutters was stolen. When
anything of this sort happened Captain Cook was accustomed to inveigle
a chief or two on board his ship and keep them there till the thing
stolen was restored. He tried to do this with the King of Hawai, but
the people suspected his design, and at the critical moment news came
that a canoe had been burnt and a chief killed. The King refused to go
another step, and then Captain Cook, who was armed with a hanger and a
double-barrelled gun, did a terribly foolish thing for such a man to
do.
[Illustration: MISSED HIM AND KILLED ANOTHER MAN BEHIND HIM.]
He began to walk away to his boat, turning his back on the armed and
angry natives. To do so was to invite certain death, and one of the
warriors attacked him with his spear. He turned and shot at the man,
missed him, and killed another man behind him. A shower of stones
followed, and the marines fired on the natives.
Cook appears now to have seen the seriousness of the situation, and
signalled to those in the boat to stop firing. While he was doing this
a chief ran up and drove his spear through his body. Some accounts
say that it was an iron dagger, others that he was clubbed on the
head simultaneously. At any rate he staggered forward and fell face
downwards in the water, on which the natives “immediately leapt in
after and kept him under for a few minutes, then hauled him out upon
the rocks and beat his head against them several times, so that there
is no doubt but that he quickly expired.”
Such was the end of the great Circumnavigator, the greatest seaman of
his time, and a man honoured wherever the science of navigation was
known. It was a miserable end to such a brilliant career, miserable as
was that of the great Magellan, who lost his life and the deathless
honour of being the first sea-captain to sail round the world in just
such a petty and ignoble squabble on the beach of a lonely islet in the
Phillipines.
But though his death was ignoble, it can detract nothing from the
splendour of his life’s work. He was not perfect--no great man
is--and it is only the mournful truth to say that the meanest and most
unlovable trait in his character was the direct and culpable cause
of his death. Among sailors this is already forgotten, and they only
remember him, as they are well warranted in doing, as the greatest of
English mariners, and the man who conquered their most terrible enemy
and their deadliest destroyer.
VII
_LORD CLIVE_,
_QUILL-DRIVER AND CONQUEROR_
VII
LORD CLIVE
It is one of the distinctions of Robert Clive to be at once the model
of all bad boys and the forlorn hope of their despairing fathers. He
was probably the very worst boy that ever became a really great man.
Of his early youth there is absolutely nothing good to be said, saving
only the fact that he was possessed of that brute, bulldog courage
which thousands of English boys, whose names have never been heard
beyond their native towns, have possessed in common with him.
He was idle, passionate, aggressive, not over truthful, and of a
distinctly turbulent, not to say piratical disposition. For instance,
he had not reached his teens before he established a sort of juvenile
reign of terror in the sleepy old town of Market Drayton, which had at
once the misfortune and the honour of being his birthplace.
Even the school-books have not omitted to tell us how the boy became
the father of the future pirate and Empire-Maker, by organising the
kindred spirits of the town into a buccaneering band, as captain of
which he levied blackmail in the shape of nuts, apples, sweetmeats, and
even coin of the realm on the shopkeepers.
If the tribute were punctually paid, well and good; but if one rebelled
or defaulted, the odds were that he very soon had a heavy bill to pay
for window-repairing, or else there would be sudden deaths in his
fowl-house, or, peradventure, his errand-boy, if not an accomplice
of the gang, would return prematurely from his rounds with his goods
missing and undelivered, and his person in a somewhat battered and
dishevelled condition.
The most respectable feat that he appears to have accomplished in
these days would, after all, appear to be the climbing of the lofty
church steeple, and his enjoyment on that dizzy eminence of the horror
and consternation of the townsfolk. This feat was, in its way, as
characteristic of the man that was to be as was his first essay in
world-piracy, for later on we shall see how he reached a far more dizzy
eminence than this and kept his head as few others would have done.
His school life appears to have been as unsatisfactory as his home
life. He was sent to academy after academy, and at each, ushers and
pedagogues struggled with him in vain--although of itself this fact was
not greatly to his discredit, since the methods of alleged education in
the first half of the eighteenth century were even more unnatural than
they are now. Still, the fact remains that he was a hopeless dunce,
self-willed and idle, and of an unlovable disposition, redeemed only by
the one good quality of intrepid pluck.
One of his uncles, in a family letter, says, semi-prophetically of him:
“Fighting, to which he is out of measure addicted, gives his temper
such a fierceness and imperiousness that it flies out on every trifling
occasion.”
It is also said that one of his schoolmasters saw signs of future
greatness in the dullard of whom neither he nor any of his brethren
could make even a presentable schoolboy, but this is probably a story
of the “I told you so” order, possibly invented by the worthy pedagogue
some time after the event. Be this, however, as it may, the fact is
that in the end the last of the pedagogues seems to have thrown the
job up in despair and returned him back on his father’s hands as a
hopelessly hard case.
Now it so happened that in those days there was a refuge for
the destitute, or perhaps it would be more correct to say the
ne’er-do-well, which in these days is hardly represented by any portion
of our Colonial Empire.
If there appeared to be no chance of a lad doing anything decent at
home; if his parents were too poor to buy him a commission in the Army,
and hadn’t interest enough to get him into the Navy, and if he were,
as Clive undoubtedly was, too much of a dunce to have a chance in
any other respectable profession, the last thing that could be done
for him was to get him a writership in the service of the East India
Company.
If this could be done, two prospects were open to him. He would die
of fever in a year or two, after a hard struggle to live upon his
miserable pay, or he would “shake the Pagoda Tree,” and come home a
wealthy nabob, with a brick-dust complexion, a sun-dried and somewhat
shrivelled conscience, and a liver perpetually on strike. As it
happened, however, Robert Clive availed himself of neither of these
prospects, since the mysterious Fates had a third one in store for him.
Certainly they were _very_ mysterious Fates which presided over the
early fortunes of the future Conqueror of India, and upon none of their
darlings have they frowned so blackly and then suddenly turned round
and smiled so brightly as upon the scapegrace of Market Drayton.
To begin with, the voyage to India in those days, even for people with
large means, was a weary and miserable business. Ocean greyhounds, the
Suez Canal, and the Peninsular Railway, were undreamt of; and the heavy
Indiamen lumbered toilfully round the Cape, across the Indian Ocean,
and up the Bay of Bengal, taking their time about it--sometimes six
months, sometimes a year, or more. In Clive’s case it was more, for
his ship first crossed the Atlantic to the Brazils, and stopped there
for some months. Here he spent all his money, and got in return a
smattering of Portuguese, which he afterwards found useful.
When he eventually landed on the surf-beaten beach of Madras, he was
not only penniless but in debt. The only person of influence to whom
he had an introduction had left for England. His duties were both
laborious and distasteful. He had no friends and was too shy and
awkwardly proud to make any, and for months he was veritably a stranger
in a strange land, and, to crown all, he became wretchedly ill.
How mournful he really felt his position to be, and how far the stern
discipline of misery had already softened his intractable disposition,
may be seen from one of his letters home, in which he says:
“I have not enjoyed one happy day since I left my native country. If
I should be so far blest as to revisit it again, but more especially
Manchester” (this, by the way, was his mother’s native place) “the
centre of all my wishes, all that I could hope or desire for would be
presented before me in one view.”
How little did the despairing lad dream as he wrote thus in some
interval of his weary drudgery that when he did revisit his native land
it would be as a conqueror, laurel-crowned, and hailed as one worthy to
rank with the first soldiers of his age!
But, bright as his fortune was to be, he appears just now to have been
doing very little to deserve it. Macaulay tells us, in that brilliant
essay of his, that he behaved just as badly to his official superiors
as he had done to his schoolmasters, and came several times very near
to being dismissed, and at length, so heavily did sickness of body
and weariness of soul lie upon him, that twice in quick succession he
attempted to blow his brains out, and twice the pistol missed fire.
If those had been the days of central-fire, self-cocking revolvers,
instead of flint-lock pistols, the history of Asia would have been
changed, and what is now our Indian Empire would probably have been a
French possession.
It will be necessary just here to quote a little history with a view
to seeing how matters stood in India at the time when Clive, as it is
said, flung away the second useless pistol, and, like Wallenstein,
exclaimed that after all he must have been born for something great.
The map of India then was very different to what it is now. There was
no red about it at all. In the East, France was practically mistress of
the seas, whatever she might be elsewhere. The British flag only flew
over one spot, and that only by sufferance. This was the little trading
settlement of Madras, which was rented from the Nabob of the Carnatic,
who was only the deputy of the deputy of the once mighty prince whom
Europe knew vaguely as the Great Mogul.
Fort St. George and Fort St. David were mere parodies of military
stations, and the nucleus of the army which was to conquer the whole
Peninsula consisted chiefly of half-trained natives, miscellaneously
armed with bows and arrows, swords and bucklers, and here and there a
firelock. On the other hand, France possessed the Island of Mauritius
and the town and district of Pondicherry, the former governed by
Labourdonnais and the latter by Dupleix, both men of great capacity and
still greater ambition.
France and England were just then at war in Europe, and Labourdonnais
thought it a good time to crush English trade in India while it was yet
in its infancy, so, in spite of all the British East Indian fleet could
do to stop him, he appeared with his ships off Madras, landed a large
body of troops, forced Fort St. George to surrender, and hoisted the
French flag on its battlements.
Happily, this roused the jealousy of Dupleix. Labourdonnais had pledged
his honour that Madras should be restored on the payment of a moderate
ransom. Dupleix, who had already dreamt of being sole master of India,
was determined that it should be wiped off the map altogether, so he
accused his fellow Governor of trespassing on his preserves, and in the
end succeeded in annulling his conditions and marching the Governor of
Fort St. George, with the principal servants of the Company, in triumph
off to Pondicherry.
Unfortunately for him, there was one whom he did not take, not a
principal servant by any means, only an insignificant, underpaid
quill-driver, who had slipped out of the town disguised as a Mussulman,
and yet Dupleix would have made a very good bargain if he could have
exchanged all his other prisoners of war for him.
Clive reached Fort St. David, a dependency of Fort St. George, in
safety, and there, taking advantage of the anger roused by this gross
breach of faith, he exchanged the pen for the sword, and the writer
became an ensign in the East India Company’s army, such as it was.
Scarcely, however, had he done so than peace was made in Europe, and
therefore in India. Clive, no doubt in great disgust, was sent back to
his desk, but, happily for him and the British Empire, not for long.
Fortunately, too, submarine telegraphs had not been invented then, and
India was almost always a year behind Europe, so Governor Dupleix made
up his mind to have a war on his own account, and the prize of this
war was to be, as Macaulay puts it, “nothing less than the magnificent
inheritance of the House of Tamerlane.”
To this end he took such skilful advantage of the disputes of the
pretenders to the throne of Nizam al Mulk, the last of the great
Viceroys of the Deccan, that within a very short time he secured the
triumph of Mirzapha Jung, his _protégé_, and rose himself to such a
position that, in the name of this puppet, he was the virtual ruler
of thirty millions of people, and master of the whole Carnatic,
saving only the city of Trichinopoly, which was all that was left to
Mohammed Ali, the candidate with whom the English Company had sided in
a half-hearted and wholly futile fashion.
At this juncture, Clive, who was now twenty-five years old, and who
occupied a sort of hybrid post with the title of Commissary of the
forces, took upon himself to represent to his superiors that unless
something very decided was done, the French must invariably become
Lords Paramount of the whole Peninsula. They hadn’t a notion what was
to be done, but Clive had, and the brazen effrontery of his plan seems
to have paralysed the authorities into giving him a free hand.
The situation was this: The triumphant Frenchman, believing his
quickly-acquired dominion a permanent one, had raised a tall pillar to
his own glory on the site of his greatest victory, and round this was
growing up a city, the name of which in English meant the City of the
Victory of Dupleix. Chunda Sahib, successor of Mirzapha, was besieging
Trichinopoly, supported by several hundred trained French soldiers.
Major Lawrence, commander of the English garrison at Madras, had gone
to England, and the English Company possessed no officer of proved
ability. The natives, dazzled by the rapid and brilliant triumphs of
Dupleix, and remembering the times when they had seen his colours
flying over Fort St. George, looked with contemptuous pity on the
English as a remnant of feeble shopkeepers who were soon to be cast
into the sea. And so, in all probability, they would have been if that
historic pistol had gone off a few years before.
Clive, viewing the situation with true military genius, saw two facts:
first, that it would be ridiculous with the force at his disposal to
attack the besiegers of Trichinopoly; and second, that, if a dash were
made at Arcot, the capital and favourite residence of the Nabobs of the
Carnatic, which is rather less than a hundred miles inland from Madras,
the siege of Trichinopoly would probably be raised, and so this he
determined to do.
His army consisted of two hundred English soldiers and three hundred
Sepoys, with eight English officers, of whom only two had ever seen an
action. He made the journey by forced marches through the thunder and
lightning and rain of the wet season, and so astounded the garrison of
Arcot by his utterly unexpected appearance before the gates that they
ran without striking a blow.
Clive now found himself master of a half-ruined fort, which he at
once proceeded to strengthen and victual as best he might, well
knowing that he would have to fight for what he had got. Presently the
panic-stricken garrison came back, and brought with it reinforcements
which gave it the respectable strength of three thousand men. In the
middle of the night on which they arrived and sat down before the
town to think matters over, Clive, without waiting to be besieged as
he should have done by all the rules of Eastern warfare, marched out,
caught them napping, cut them to pieces, and marched back again without
losing a man.
Naturally the news of such doings as this flew fast to Trichinopoly
and Pondicherry, and clearly something had to be done to crush this
insolent upstart before he gave any further trouble. To this end four
thousand men were sent by Chunda Sahib, under his son Rajah, and by the
time these reached the walls of the old fort they had been increased
by reinforcements to ten thousand, and had, moreover, been joined by
a detachment of a hundred and fifty French soldiers whom Dupleix had
dispatched in hot haste from Pondicherry.
As has been said, the place they had come to attack was a half-ruined
old fort, with dry ditches and hardly any defences worth serious
mention, and its garrison by this time consisted only of a hundred and
twenty Englishmen and two hundred Sepoys. Four of the eight officers
were dead, and the commander of what looked very like a forlorn hope
was an ex-quill-driver twenty-five years old.
And yet for fifty days and nights the besiegers hurled themselves in
vain against the rotten and crumbling battlements behind which that
dauntless handful of half-starved men had made up their minds either
to stand till help came, or to fall like the heroes that they were.
The confidence and affection which the gallant young commander inspired
in his men--European and native alike--during this terrible time is one
of the most splendid tributes to his fame. When there was nothing left
but rice to live and fight on, the very Sepoys came to him of their
own will to ask that all the grain should be given to the Europeans,
who wanted more nourishment than they did. As for them, they would
gladly be content with the water that it was boiled in! Men like this
are bad to beat, and so Rajah Sahib found in spite of all his enormous
advantages.
But the splendid defence of Arcot had by this time done something more
than hold the French and their allies in check. One Morari Row, the
chief of a body of six thousand Mahrattas--the bandit ancestors of some
of the finest soldiery that now fights under the flag of Britain--had
been hired to defend Mohammed Ali against his enemies, but so far,
instead of helping, he had been waiting to see which way the cat would
jump. His personal experience of the British had taught him that, if
they were not dogs or old women, they were seemingly only fit for the
bazaar and the counting-house, and certainly no worthy allies for
a race of warriors. But now the gallantry of Clive and his men was
ringing all through the Carnatic, and Morari swore by all his gods
that, since the English really could fight after all, and were able to
help themselves to such purpose, he hadn’t the slightest objection to
helping them.
Having decided this in his own prudent mind, he gave his warriors
orders to march, and no sooner did it transpire that their objective
was the sorely beleaguered fortress of Arcot than Rajah Sahib came
to the conclusion that he had got a harder nut between his teeth
than his jaws could crack, and so he made overtures of peace in the
true Oriental style--that is to say, he offered a huge bribe for an
unconditional surrender, and accompanied the offer with a threat of
general assault and subsequent extermination if the offer were refused.
The young quill-driver’s reply was characteristic.
“Tell Rajah Sahib,” he said to the envoy, “that I refuse his bribe with
as much scorn as I receive his threat. Tell him also that his master
and father is a usurper and his army a rabble, and bid him beware how
he brings them into a breach defended by English soldiers.”
Rajah Sahib declined the warning, and prepared for attack by making his
fanatic followers gloriously drunk with bhang and ether assorted drugs.
He also selected the day of a great Moslem festival for the assault,
and enlisted the services of some elephants, whose heads he covered
with spiked plates of iron, and these, when the attack was delivered,
were driven against the gates to act as living battering-rams.
But Clive had already foreseen that living battering-rams had the
disadvantage of working both ways, and so the elephants were received
with such a galling fire that, instead of charging the gates, they
turned round and made lanes through the army behind them with
distinctly demoralising effect.
This was a bad beginning, but the end was worse. Clive acted not only
as general-in-command, but also as an ordinary gunner, and he seems,
moreover, to have pretty well filled all the posts between. He worked
as hard as any soldier or Sepoy of them all. There were more weapons
than men to use them, so the rear ranks loaded and primed the muskets,
and passed them up to the front as fast as they could be fired, and
Rajah Sahib speedily learnt what Clive had meant by a breach defended
by English soldiers, for the fire was so fast and fierce that the more
men that he sent into the breach the more stopped there--and that was
about all there was in it from his point of view.
Three times the onset was repeated, and three times the attacking
swarms were mown down by the leaden hail-storm that swept the breach,
and after the third time the Rajah and his merry men had had enough of
it and retreated to their lines.
[Illustration: INSTEAD OF CHARGING THEY TURNED ROUND AND MADE LANES
THROUGH THE ARMY BEHIND THEM.]
The night passed in anxious watching, every man in his place and every
gun loaded, but their last shot had been fired and the morning light
showed that Rajah Sahib and what was left of his army had found the
work too much highly seasoned for their taste; that they had just run
away, leaving all their guns, ammunition, and stores to be picked up by
the victors at their leisure.
Such was the forever memorable defence of Arcot, and such too was the
practical foundation of the British Empire in India. It was the work
of a hundred and twenty-five English soldiers and two hundred Sepoys,
inspired to heroism by a young man whom Fortune had suddenly plucked
out of the wrong place and set down in the right one.
Clive was by no means the man to look upon work as done because it
was well begun. The authorities at Fort St. George promptly sent him
two hundred more English soldiers and seven hundred Sepoys, and with
this force--which was quite a large army for him--he marched out to
join hands with Morari Row, attacked Rajah Sahib at the head of five
thousand men with a stiffening of three hundred French regulars, hit
him very hard, and generally convinced people that an Englishman worthy
of his name and race had at length taken matters in hand.
Unhappily, however, the English were not as strong in the
council-chamber as they were in the field, and while the authorities
were hesitating, Rajah Sahib and Dupleix retrieved their loss to such
purpose that a native army supported by four hundred French troops
marched almost up to the walls of Fort St. George and proceeded to
amuse themselves by laying the settlement waste, with the result that
Captain Clive had to come to the rescue, and the end was another
overwhelming defeat, during which about half of the French regulars
were either killed or taken prisoners.
This physical victory was followed by a moral one no less effective.
The vaingloriously-named City of the Victory of Dupleix, surmounted by
its magniloquently inscribed pillar, lay at Clive’s mercy and directly
in his path, and he promptly pulled the pillar down and wiped the city
off the face of the earth. He didn’t do this because he personally
disliked either Dupleix or his nation, but in doing it he showed
that he was statesman as well as soldier, for, as he well knew, the
destruction of the City of Victory was to the waiting and watching
millions of India the symbol of the destruction and discredit of the
French power, and the establishment and vindication of the British.
From that day to this Britain’s star in the East has been in the
ascendant and that of France on the decline.
How completely all this and what followed was the work of one man, and
one only is eloquently shown by the pronouncement of old Morari Row
to the effect that the English who followed Clive must be of quite
a different tribe or breed to those who followed anybody else, and
further by the fact that he inflicted two decisive defeats upon the
French at Covelong and Chingleput, with a force consisting of five
hundred raw Sepoy levies, and two hundred newly-imported scourings of
the London slums, who had so little of the soldier in them that when a
shot killed one in the first skirmish all the rest turned round and ran
away; while on another occasion the report of a cannon so frightened
the sentries that they all left their posts, and one of them was
discovered occupying a strategic position at the bottom of a well!
And yet Clive, somehow, made steady, disciplined soldiers out of this
miserable rabble, and, though at last he was so ill that he could
hardly stand, led them to victory and turned the French out of their
forts--which was perhaps a miracle even greater than the making of
Cromwell’s Ironsides.
After this the young man, having well earned a holiday, got married and
came home for his honeymoon. He was at once hailed as the saviour of
India--or at any rate of the East India Company, the directors of which
drained many a good bottle of port to the toast of “General” Clive; and
even his father half incredulously admitted that “after all it seemed
that the booby had something in him.”
But “the booby,” who had come back moderately rich, bore no malice,
and at once began to repair the evil of his youth by paying off all
the debts of his family. He then proceeded to waste his substance and
his time by getting into Parliament and getting turned out again on
petition, after which he very properly went back to India to do work
that parliamentary orators couldn’t do.
His first exploit was the reduction of the pirate stronghold of
Gheriah, which had long dominated the whole Arabian Gulf, the next
was the Avenging of one of the blackest crimes in history. There is
no need to tell of it here, for is not the story of the Black Hole of
Calcutta deep-graven in the memory of every man and woman, boy and
girl, of Anglo-Saxon blood? Forty-eight hours after the news reached
Madras Clive was given the command of nine hundred British infantry and
fifteen hundred Sepoys, and with this army, supported by a fleet under
Admiral Watson, he marched to the conquest of an empire half as large
as Europe.
Curiously enough, however, he began by treating with Surajah
Dowlah--the arch-criminal of the Black Hole--instead of crushing him,
and, more amazing still, during the course of the negotiations, he
deliberately forged Admiral Watson’s name to a treaty intended to
deceive an adherent whom he knew to have made terms with the other
side. It is the most inexplicable act in his career, and, being so, it
is only a waste of words to try and explain it away. He did it, and
there’s an end of it.
The next act in the now swiftly passing drama was the first and only
council of war that Clive ever held. It was the eve of Plassey, an
occasion ever memorable in the annals, not only of Britain but of the
whole Orient. He was on one bank of the river, Surajah Dowlah was on
the other with an army outnumbering his by twenty to one, splendidly
equipped, very strong in artillery, and, as usual, supported and
officered by the inevitable Frenchmen. The river was the Rubicon which
lay between Clive and the Empire of India--and for once in his life he
hesitated.
He called a council of war. It decided against crossing the river with
three thousand men in face of sixty thousand, and Clive endorsed the
verdict. Then he went apart under some palm trees and held another and
a wiser council with himself, and this council promptly and utterly
revoked the decision of the other.
The next morning the river was crossed and the next night the little
army encamped within a mile of the Nabob’s host. At sunrise the next
day Surajah Dowlah, who in the midst of his myriads had passed a night
haunted, as has been suggested, by the ghosts of the men and women who
perished in the Black Hole, sent forth his forty thousand infantry,
his fifteen thousand cavalry, his batteries of fifty guns, and his
iron-plated war-elephants to crush the invader once and for all, and on
they went like some huge tidal wave, roaring and rushing, to overwhelm
some little tree-clad island--and then, just as the human avalanche was
in mid-career, the despot weakling’s will wavered, or, more probably,
his mind broke down, and he gave the order to halt and retreat, almost
before a blow was struck.
It was the moment of grace for Clive and he seized it. The three
thousand charged the sixty thousand, and all of a sudden the impending
tragedy on which the fate of all India from the Himalayas to Cape
Comorin depended, was turned into a farce. Of the sixty thousand only
five hundred were slain; of the three thousand twenty-two were killed
and fifty wounded. The whole thing was over in an hour, and India was
won.
To Clive himself the result was an appointment as Governor-General over
the whole of the Company’s territory in Bengal, and this virtually
raised him to an authority higher than that of a throne, and, to his
everlasting honour be it said, that in an age and country of almost
universal corruption, he never abused it. Victory after victory in the
field, and triumph after triumph in policy now followed fast upon each
other, till French, Dutch, and native princes alike were crushed to
impotence or reduced to grovelling submission, and the crowning victory
of Chinsurah set the seal of absolute supremacy upon British rule in
India.
Three months after this Clive again came home, the possessor of fairly
won wealth which was only exceeded by the magnitude of his fame, to
be hailed as the greatest of British living Commanders, and to be
rewarded, first with a place in the Irish, and then with one in the
British Peerage.
The story of his five years’ stay in England is not an edifying one.
It is a story of wild extravagance, fierce and unworthy jealousies in
the very councils of that Company to which he had given more lands
and subjects than any European monarch possessed, and of general
dissatisfaction and disillusion.
But meanwhile the way to his last and perhaps his greatest triumph was
being prepared for him. As year after year passed it became more and
more plain that the empire he had created could not get on without him.
The men put in authority after him by the Company had but one object
in life and that was to “shake the Pagoda Tree.” In other words, to
set prince against prince and state against state for the sole purpose
of making money out of their differences, and generally to squeeze the
utmost amount of gold out of the country in the shortest possible time.
Corruption which scandalised even that corrupt age revelled in hitherto
unheard-of excesses. Everything was neglected but money-making, and the
lately-terrible English name was fast becoming a scoff and a by-word
even to the plundered and the oppressed. So in the end Clive went out
again, it being seen that he only could end a situation fast becoming
impossible.
But this time it was not to fight French, or Indian, or Dutchman, but
his own countrymen, and to win in the Council Chamber a victory that
was perhaps greater than any he had won on the battlefield. In eighteen
months he did what he had said he would do, and replaced chaos with
cosmos. It was a fitting climax to his life’s work, and yet such is the
irony of Fate and the baseness of human nature that it also came near
to proving his personal ruin.
He had fought and conquered the evil spirits of greed, corruption,
and private extortion, but he had not killed them. The hatred of
the evil-doer pursued him across the seas and roused up all the old
jealousies at home. On his first and second returns he had been hailed,
first as a man of the most brilliant promise and then as a man who had
splendidly fulfilled that promise. But now, in the country which he had
enriched by the addition of a whole empire no charge was so base that
it was not believed against him. He had put down the oppressor, the
extortioner, and the money-grubber, and he came back to his native land
to be arraigned before a committee of the House of Commons as all these
and something of a criminal to boot!
But with this third home-coming of his, his story as an Empire-Maker
ends. It is well to know that he came triumphantly out of all the
toils that his jealous and unworthy enemies had laid for him, and in
this he was happier than his great rival Dupleix, who sank through all
the gradations of poverty and misery into a nameless grave. But still
the work of his foes and that of the terrible Indian climate had
not been without effect. Crippled both in mind and body, he at last
sought refuge in opium from the tortures of the diseases which he had
contracted in the service of his country.
Time after time his genius blazed out again through the glooms that
were settling over his later days, and so great was the faith of the
Government in him that he was actually asked to go and do for North
America what he had done for India.
If the broken invalid of those days had been the same man as the
defender of Arcot and the victor of Plassey, the history of the
Anglo-Saxon race might well have been changed, for Robert Clive would
not only have been strong to crush the rebels, but also just and
generous to procure them afterwards those equal rights of citizenship
the denial of which split Anglo-Saxondom in two.
Of this, at least, we may be fairly certain: there would have been no
Bunker’s Hill and no Brandywine River save as geographical expressions,
and there would have been neither a Saratoga nor a Yorktown save as
towns and nothing more.
But this was not to be. Clive’s genius had given forth its last flash
and the eclipse had come. On November 22, 1774, some ten weeks after
the assembly of the Revolutionary Congress at Philadelphia, Robert,
Lord Clive, Baron of Plassey, and Conqueror of the domains of the great
Tamerlane, for the third time put a pistol to his head--and this time
it went off.
It was, as Macaulay says, an awful close to such a career, and yet,
after all, granted even everything that his worst enemies said against
him, Robert Clive had well and worthily earned a place in the front
rank of Britain’s Empire-Makers.
On Sir Thomas Wren’s tomb in St. Paul’s stands the Latin legend which
translated reads: “If you seek his monument look around you!” If a man
could be endowed with an infinite range of vision he might be placed on
the highest pinnacle of the Himalayas, and as he looked east and west
and south the same might be said to him as the epitaph of Robert Clive;
for all that he could see from the Arabian Gulf to the Bay of Bengal,
and from the Himalayan slopes to the coral reefs of Cape Comorin, would
be the monument of his eternal fame--and is there man born of woman who
could desire a worthier?
VIII
_WARREN HASTINGS_,
_THE FIRST UNCROWNED KING OF INDIA_
VIII
WARREN HASTINGS
Both in point of time and personal capacity, Warren Hastings, first
Governor-General of the British Empire in India, was the successor
of Robert, Lord Clive. At the same time it may be as well to point
out in this connection that there might be more literal correctness
in describing Warren Hastings as an Empire-Preserver rather than an
Empire-Maker.
It was the victor of Plassey who rough-hewed the stones upon which the
now gorgeous fabric of our Indian Empire stands. It was Hastings who,
in spite of stupendous difficulties, took those stones and laid them
down according to that plan which he had formed, and which has been
followed in the main by all who have added to the structure.
As was said in other words of William of Orange, one of the greatest
claims that the great Governor has to the interest and admiration of
those who have a share in the splendid inheritance that he built
up, lies in the fact that he did his work in the face of everlasting
hindrances and in the midst of perpetual embarrassments, which must
infallibly have discouraged and bewildered any but a man upon whom the
gods had set the stamp of greatness, and, in their own way, crowned
him one of the kings of men. In short, like the grandson of William
the Silent, Warren Hastings was first and foremost an overcomer of
difficulties.
Great and splendid and enduring as his work undoubtedly was, it would
not, after all, have been very difficult to do if he had just been left
to do it--not helped, because he wasn’t the kind of man who wanted
help, but just left alone. Instead of this, however, as though it were
not enough that his work of organising and consolidating what the
sword of Clive had won, and combating the infinity of complications
arising out of the rivalry of a dozen warring native potentates, he
was purposely surrounded in his own council-chamber by unscrupulous
enemies of his own blood and country, whose only title to historical
recognition is now the infamy that they have earned by failing to
prevent the doing of that work which Warren Hastings saw had got to be
done, and which he, with an inflexible heroism, decided to do in spite
of everything that his enemies, white or brown, Mohammedan, Hindoo or
British, could do to cripple him.
Sir Alfred Lyall, his most recent biographer, has very happily said of
him that “perhaps no man of undisputed genius ever inherited less in
mind or money from his parents or owed them fewer obligations of any
kind.” His father, Pynaston Hastings, was the vagrant ne’er-do-well son
of a fine old family. He married when only fifteen without any means or
prospect of supporting a family. Warren was the second son. His father
was only seventeen at his birth, and his mother died a few days later.
As soon as he was old enough Pynaston took holy orders, married again,
obtained a living in the West Indies, and there died, leaving his son
to be put into a charity school by his grandfather.
This is not much for a father to do for a son, but there was something
else that Pynaston Hastings did which was of very great consequence,
though in the nature of the case no credit is due to him for it.
He transmitted to him the blood of a long line of ancestors, which
stretched away back through one of the followers of William the Norman
to the days of those old pirate kings of the Northland who, as I have
pointed out before, were none the worse fathers of Empire-Makers
because they were pirates as well.
One of his ancestors, John Hastings, Lord of the Manors of
Yelford-Hastings in Oxfordshire, and of Dalesford in Worcestershire,
lost about half of his worldly goods, including the plate that he
sent to be coined at the Oxford Mint, in helping Charles Stuart to
fight the great Oliver, and afterwards spent most of the remainder in
buying his peace from the Parliament. It was on the ancient estate of
Dalesford, long before sold to the stranger and the alien, that Warren
Hastings was born, some two hundred years later, practically a pauper
and almost an outcast, under the shadow of his ancestral home.
When he came to reasoning years he made a boyish resolve, challenging
fate with all the splendid insolence of a seven-year-old dreamer, that
some day he would make his fortune and buy the old place back--which
in due course he did, although in those days his prospect of doing so
was about as small as it was of reigning over the millions of subjects
whose descendants to-day revere his memory almost as that of one of
their own demigods.
When he was twelve years old Warren was taken away from the charity
school by one of his uncles and sent to Westminster, where he
distinguished himself by winning a King’s scholarship in the year 1747.
Even when his poor old grandfather, the last Hastings of Dalesford, and
the miserably paid rector of the parish which his ancestors had owned,
sent Warren to sit beside the little rustics of the village school, he
immediately singled himself out from them by the willing intelligence
with which he took to his work and afterwards the headmaster of
Westminster had high hopes of university distinctions for him. It was
indeed a somewhat curious coincidence that Robert Clive should have
been such an exceedingly bad boy and the completer of his work such a
good one.
But the Fates had already decided that Warren Hastings was to graduate
with honours in a very much bigger university than that on the banks
of the Isis or the Cam. His uncle died suddenly, and the orphan lad
was passed on to the care of a distant connection who happened to be a
director of the East India Company.
His headmaster remonstrated strongly, but happily without effect,
against his immediate removal to Christ’s Hospital to learn
account-keeping before going out to Bengal as a writer in the service
of “John Company.”
It seems as though the worthy Dr. Nichols had a very high opinion of
his intellectual abilities, for, when all his protests failed, he
actually offered to send his brilliant young pupil to Oxford at his own
expense.
Happily for the British Empire Mr. Director Chiswick, the relative
aforesaid, stuck to his selfish project of getting him off his hands as
quickly and permanently as possible by sending him out to Calcutta to
take jungle fever or make a fortune, just in the same way that Clive’s
despairing parents had done.
He sailed for Calcutta when he was seventeen, the same age as his
precious father was when he was born. He had been two years at the desk
in Calcutta when there came the news that Clive had taken Arcot and put
a very different complexion on the struggle between the English and
French Companies for the supremacy of India.
About that time he was sent to a little town on the Hooghly about a
mile from Moorshedabad, and while he was here driving bargains with
native silk-weavers and tea merchants, Surajah Dowlah marched into
Calcutta and cast such English prisoners as he could lay hold of into
the Black Hole.
Hastings was also taken prisoner, but most fortunately did not get
into the Black Hole, and he appears to have been set at large on the
intercession of the chief of the Dutch factory. During the period which
followed his partial release--for he was still under surveillance at
Moorshedabad--he made his first essay in diplomacy, or what would
perhaps be more correctly described as political intrigue, with the
result that the city got too hot for him, and he fled to Fulda, an
island below Calcutta, where, as has been pithily said, the English
fugitives from Fort William “were encamped like a shipwrecked crew
awaiting rescue.”
The rescue came in the shape of the combined naval and military
expedition, commanded by Admiral Watson and Robert Clive, which was
destined to end in the triumph of Plassey, and Warren Hastings, as
Macaulay aptly suggests in his brilliant but singularly misinformed
essay, doubtless inspired by the example of Clive and the similarity of
their entrance on to the stage of Indian affairs, like him exchanged
the pen for the sword, and fought through the campaign. But Clive saw
“that there was more in his head than his arm,” and after the battle
of Plassey he sent him as resident Agent of the Company to the Court
of Meer Jaffier, the puppet-nabob who had been set up in the place of
Surajah Dowlah.
He held this post until he was made a Member of Council in 1761, and
was obliged to remove to Calcutta. Clive was at home now, and the
interregnum of oppression, extortion, and general mismanagement was
in full swing; but the man who was afterwards so grossly wronged and
falsely impeached, and who passed through the most celebrated trial in
English history charged with just such crimes, had so little taste for
them that three years later he came back a comparatively poor man, and
the fortune he had he either gave away to his relations or lost through
the failure of a Dutch trading-house.
After a stay of four years, during which he renewed his intimacy with
his old schoolfellow, the creator of the immortal John Gilpin, and made
the acquaintance of Johnson and Boswell, he found himself so reduced in
circumstances that he not only had to ask the Directors of the Company
to give him more employment in India, but when he got it he was forced
to borrow the money to pay his passage out again.
It is quite impossible to form any just and reasonable judgment of the
work which Warren Hastings now went out to do unless one first gets an
adequate idea of the condition of things obtaining in India before the
English went there, and of the conditions that would have obtained,
if men like Clive, Hastings, Cornwallis, and Wellesley had not by one
means and another--some good, some bad, but all just what were possible
under the circumstances--succeeded in imposing the _Pax Britannica_
upon the rival and constantly warring potentates who governed the
native populations.
No doubt the war on the Rohillas, or the so-called spoliation of the
Begums of Oude, together with more or less magnified incidentals,
formed famous themes in after years for the inflated eloquence and
grandiloquent over-statements of Edmund Burke and Sheridan, and for the
far less comprehensible or excusable special pleading of Lord Macaulay.
It was, no doubt, very affecting to see the patched and powdered fine
ladies who paid their fifty guineas a seat in Westminster Hall to
watch the men of words mangling the reputation of the man of deeds,
weeping and fainting at the harrowing pictures they drew--mostly on
their own imaginations--of the sufferings which he had _not_ caused;
but we of to-day are sufficiently far removed from the personal spite
and the passion and rivalry which inspired the enemies and accusers
of the great Governor to be able to look at things as they actually
were, and in doing so we shall see that, however heavy was the hand
that Warren Hastings laid upon the subject peoples, it was but as a
caress to a blow when compared with the oppression and extortion with
which conqueror after conqueror, Mohammedan and Hindoo, Sikh, Afghan,
and Mahratta, had ground down and despoiled the helpless races which
successively passed under their sway.
Order, however dearly bought, is always less expensive than anarchy,
and the impassioned periods of Burke and Sheridan look somewhat silly
when we compare them with the sober facts. It never seems to have
struck them or their audience to make any comparison between the
English gentleman and loyal servant of his country whom they would have
handed down to history as a monster of iniquity, and those real tyrants
of the type of Surajah Dowlah, Hyder-Ali, and Nana-Sahib, whose brutal
rule and ruthless wars of conquest and extermination must have been,
under the circumstances, the only possible alternative to the strong
and steady control of the Englishman.
The first thing that Warren Hastings did on his return was to
reorganise the trade of the Province, and in this he succeeded so
well that the Directors rewarded him in 1772 with the Governorship
of Bengal; and if they could have stopped there, leaving him to do
the rest, the immediately subsequent history of India might have been
very much more creditable to the rulers and more pleasant reading
for the descendants of the ruled than it was. But unhappily a body
of traders and shareholders became possessed with the idea that they
were the proper sort of people to rule a country divided by political
and religious factions, with a history of almost constant warfare
stretching back for centuries, and situated fifteen thousand miles away.
This, on the face of it, was an impossibility. When they had found
their Governor they should have trusted him to govern, instead of
sending out his personal enemies to sit at his council-table to spy
upon his actions and hamper and oppose him in everything that he did.
But there was something else in its way quite as serious as this.
Practically all the charges that were brought against Warren Hastings
on his impeachment are answered and disposed of by the fact that the
only condition upon which he could retain his position and do the work
that he had set his soul upon doing was, in three words, making India
_pay_. John Company looked upon his new possession as a trader on a
market. With the Directors, who, after all were Hastings’ masters, it
was business first, and policy and government a good distance after.
Even Macaulay admits that every exhortation to govern leniently and
respect the rights of the native princes and their subjects was
accompanied by a demand for increased contributions. “The inconsistency
was at once manifest to their vice-regent at Calcutta, who, with an
empty treasury, with an unpaid army, with his own salary often in
arrear, with deficient crops, with Government tenants daily running
away, was called upon to remit home another half-million without fail.”
There is another thing to be remembered before we can judge Warren
Hastings fairly in the matter of his forced contributions. The tea
that was flung overboard in Boston Harbour in the December of 1773 was
imported by the East India Company. The connection will appear more
obvious when we look at what followed.
Great Britain was about to plunge into war, east and west, north and
south. Criminal misgovernment at home had produced revolt abroad.
Disaster after disaster and disgrace after disgrace were soon to befall
the British arms. The Anglo-Saxon race was about to be split in two,
and England herself was to fight, if not for her very existence, at
least for her honourable place among the nations.
All this Warren Hastings foresaw with that marvellous prevision which
made some of his actions look almost prophetic, and determined that,
come what might elsewhere, the Star of the East should not be plucked
from the British Crown. He was not a soldier. He was an administrator.
His task was not to increase but to hold. He was by no means always
successful in war, and in all his long rule he never added a province
or a district to the area of British India; but what Clive won he held
and strengthened during those fateful years when the destiny of Britain
as an empire was trembling in the balances of Fate.
Now, to keep India, money was absolutely necessary, and the getting
of it was not always work that could be done with kid gloves on, and
the greatness of Warren Hastings as Empire-Maker or Holder may be seen
in the fact that he deliberately, and with his eyes open, risked his
future fortune and reputation in the doing of this work by the only
means available.
He knew that his methods would be censured by his masters and made
unscrupulous use of by his enemies, and he said so in so many words,
and, careless of criticism and undeterred by the most virulent and
treasonable opposition, he succeeded so far that he was able to say
with truth that he had rescued one province from infamy, and two from
total ruin. It is simply amazing to the dispassionate reader of the
present day to watch the needless struggles which were imposed upon
this man, already confronted by a titanic task, by the very men who
ought to have been the first, for their own sakes and their country’s,
to have made his way as smooth and his burdens as light as possible.
The man who may be fairly described as the evil genius of Warren
Hastings’ career was that Sir Philip Francis who is generally looked
upon as the author of the far-famed Letters of Junius. He and Sir John
Clavering, both personal enemies of the Governor-General--as he was
now--were sent out as members of the Council, and to the days of their
death they never ceased to thwart and embarrass him by every means in
their power.
One reason for their enmity was undoubtedly the sordid motive of
getting him turned out of the Governor-Generalship in order that one
of them might succeed to his office, and that both might share in the
fruits of the extortions which, in him, they condemned.
This was not only unjust to Hastings, but it was also a crime against
their country, committed at a moment when she had all too much need of
such men as he was.
To my mind, at least, there is a very strong resemblance between
the savage invective of Junius and the consistent and unscrupulous
malevolence with which Sir Philip Francis tried to wreck the life-work
of a man at whose table he was not worthy to sit.
Those were days in which political rivalry and personal enmity
entailed personal consequences if they were pushed too far. Hastings
seemed to have come at length to the conclusion that India was not
large enough to hold himself and Francis. He had submitted to insult
after insult, and he would have been something more than human if his
enemy’s unceasing efforts to make his life a misery and his work a
failure had not left some bitterness in his soul, and so one fine day
he sat down and embodied his opinion of him in a Minute to the Council,
and in this he purposely put words which meant inevitable bloodshed:
“I do not trust to his promise of candour; convinced that he is
incapable of it, and that his sole purpose and wish are to embarrass
and defeat every measure which I may undertake or which may tend even
to promote the public interest if my credit is connected with them....
Every disappointment and misfortune have been aggravated by him,
and every fabricated tale of armies devoted to famine and massacre
have found their first and most ready way to his office, where it is
known they would meet with most welcome reception.... I judge of his
public conduct by my experience of his private, which I have found
void of truth and honour. This is a severe charge but temperately and
deliberately made.”
These were not words which a man in those days could write without
taking his chance of a bullet or the point of a small-sword, and
Hastings knew this perfectly well. Francis challenged him on
the spot, and the day but one after they confronted each other
with pistols at fourteen paces. Francis’s pistol missed fire, and
Hastings obligingly waited until he had reprimed. The second time the
pistol went off, but the ball flew wide. Hastings returned it very
deliberately and his enemy went down with a bullet in the right side.
[Illustration: HIS ENEMY WENT DOWN WITH A BULLET IN THE RIGHT SIDE.]
The difference between the two men may be seen from what followed.
After his adversary had been carried home, the Governor-General sent
him a friendly message offering to visit him and bury the hatchet for
good, as was customary in such affairs between gentlemen. Francis, not
being a gentleman, refused, and as soon as he was well enough to travel
he came home to England to injure by backstairs-intrigue and the most
unscrupulous lying and misrepresentation the man who, in the midst of
his difficulties and dangers, had proved all too strong for him in the
open.
To use his own words, “after a service of thirty-five years from
its commencement, and almost thirteen of them passed in the charge
and exercise of the first nominal office of the government,” Warren
Hastings at last laid down his thankless task and came home to render
an account of his stewardship before a tribunal which possessed neither
adequate knowledge to judge of his actions nor that judicial spirit of
calmness and impartiality which could alone have guaranteed him such a
trial as English justice accords to the vilest criminal.
His impeachment is not only the most notable but altogether the
most amazing trial in the history of British Law. It would be alike
superfluous and presumptuous to reproduce here an account of that which
has been described in the incomparable sentences of Lord Macaulay. His
essay on Warren Hastings has been considered by many to be the finest
of that magnificent collection of Essays and Reviews, and the story of
the Impeachment is undoubtedly the finest portion of it. Hence those
who read these lines cannot do better than read it as well. If they
have read it before they will simply be repeating a pleasure; if they
have not, then a new pleasure awaits them.
What we are concerned with here are the bare facts of the matter; but
we may first pause for a moment to look at the man as he was when he
came across the world to face his mostly incompetent and prejudiced
judges. This is how his picture is drawn by Wraxall, a contemporary and
a personal acquaintance. The portrait is certainly more faithful than
the ridiculous caricatures drawn by Burke and Sheridan.
“When he landed in his native country he had attained his fifty-second
year. In his person he was thin, but not tall, of a spare habit, very
bald, with a countenance placidly thoughtful, but when animated full
of intelligence. Placed in a situation where he might have amassed
immense wealth without exciting censure, he revisited England with
only a modest competence. In private life he was playful and gay to
a degree hardly conceivable; never carrying his political vexations
into the bosom of his family. Of a temper so buoyant and elastic that
the instant he quitted the council-board where he had been assailed by
every species of opposition, often heightened by personal acrimony, he
mixed in society like a youth upon whom care had never intruded.”
Such was the man who, in a period of national dejection which almost
amounted to disgrace, came back, the one man of his generation who
had upheld the honour of the British name abroad in a post of great
difficulty and danger, to receive, not reward, but impeachment.
He first faced his judges on February 13, 1788, “looking very infirm
and much indisposed, and dressed in a plain, poppy-coloured suit of
clothes.” He was finally acquitted on March 1, 1794! The trial thus
languished through seven sessions of Parliament, the total hearing
occupied one hundred and eighteen sittings of the Court, and the
vindication of his personal and official character from the slanders
of enemies, who were at last refuted with complete discredit to his
slanderers cost him about £100,000, of which no less than £75,000 were
actually certified legal costs--and this was the reward that England
gave to the one man who was capable of preserving to her the fruit of
the victories of Clive and his gallant lieutenants!
Modern opinion, endorsed by the high legal authority of the late Sir
James Stephen, has completely rejected alike the personal vilifications
of such self-interested traitors as Francis and Clavering, and the
emotional special-pleading of Burke and Sheridan.
“The impeachment of Warren Hastings,” he says, “is, I think, a blot on
the judicial history of the country. It was monstrous that a man should
be tortured at irregular intervals for seven years, in order that a
singularly incompetent tribunal might be addressed before an excited
audience by Burke and Sheridan, in language far removed from the
calmness with which an advocate for the prosecution ought to address a
criminal court.”
To some extent Hastings was recouped for the cost of his persecution,
even if he was not rewarded for his distinguished services. He was
granted a pension of £4,000 a year for twenty-eight and a half years,
part paid in advance, and a loan of £50,000 free of interest. But
meanwhile he had been fulfilling the dream of his boyhood by buying
back his ancestral estate for £60,000, and another £60,000 was still
owing to the lawyers.
Henceforth, disgusted, as he may well have been, with the ingratitude
of the country he had served so well in so difficult a time, he retired
to his old home and spent the remaining years of his life in the calm
pursuits of a country gentleman, diversified by the cultivation of
letters and the writing of verses.
It was in these days that he used to tell his friends how, as a little
lad of seven, he had lain in the long grass on the banks of a stream
that flowed through the old domain of Dalesford and dreamt the wild
dream whose fulfilment had, after all, been stranger than the dream
itself--for not even his boyish romance could be compared with the
fact that, during the winning of the means to buy back the home of his
fathers, he had risen to be the actual ruler of something like fifty
millions of people, and the dictator of terms of peace and war to
princes who governed territories half as large as Europe and even more
populous.
But in the end he outlived both his enemies and the discredit they had
tried to cast upon him. Two years before the battle of Waterloo he was
summoned before the Houses of Parliament in the evening of his days to
give evidence on the work of his manhood, and when he retired, after
nearly four hours’ examination, the whole crowded House of Commons rose
and stood uncovered and in silence as the old Empire-Keeper walked out
of the Chamber.
He lived to see that empire, for which he had striven so painfully and
so manfully, redeemed by the genius and valour of Rodney and Nelson
and Wellington from the disgrace and degradation which had threatened
it during the last decades of the eighteenth century, and three years
after Waterloo he died.
His remains lie in the family church at Dalesford, and, to once more
quote the words of Sir Alfred Lyall, “in Westminster Abbey a bust
and an inscription commemorate the name and career of a man who,
rising early to high place and power, held an office of the greatest
importance to his country for thirteen years, by sheer force of
character and tenaciousness against adversity, and who spent the next
seven years in defending himself before a nation which accepted the
benefits but disliked the ways of his too masterly activity.”
Lord Macaulay, who throughout his famous essay does him less than
justice, concludes it by making almost generous amends. “Not only had
the poor orphan retrieved the fallen fortunes of his line--not only
had he re-purchased the old lands and rebuilt the old dwelling--he
had preserved and extended an empire.[1] He had founded a policy. He
had administered government and war with more than the capacity of
Richelieu. He patronised learning with the judicious liberality of
Cosmo. He had been attacked by the most formidable combination of
enemies that ever sought the destruction of a single victim; and over
that combination, after a struggle of ten years, he had triumphed. He
had at length gone down to his grave in the fulness of age, in peace
after so many troubles, in honour after so much obloquy.”
[1] In the territorial sense this is hardly correct. The
great essayist probably meant extension in the sense
of increase of prestige and influence over the still
independent states of the Peninsula.
IX
_NELSON_
“_ENGLAND EXPECTS THAT EVERY MAN WILL DO HIS DUTY._”
IX
NELSON
I am conscious of more difficulties ahead in beginning this sketch
than I have felt with regard to any other of the series, for, while on
the one hand it would be absurd to omit from the glorious ranks of our
Empire-Makers the most glorious of them all, it is at the same time
practically impossible to say anything fresh or even anything that is
not very generally known about the man who, however much he may once
have been slighted, and however inadequately his earlier services may
have been rewarded during his life, has now come to be the idol of the
country that he saved from invasion and the Empire that he preserved
from destruction.
His life has been written and re-written, his character and his actions
have been discussed and rediscussed, the most private acts and thoughts
of his life have been dragged out into the full glare of publicity--a
fate which any great man would have to be a very great sinner to
deserve--but when all this has been said and done there remains a
single, sharply-defined individuality of this incomparable naval
captain whom the whole world now acknowledges and reveres, quite apart
from all national considerations, as the greatest sailor who ever trod
a deck and the greatest naval strategist who ever planned a battle or
took a fleet into action.
It has been said that when a nation is on the brink of ruin the Fates
either hasten its end or send some great man to restore its fortunes.
It certainly was thus with the Britain of Nelson’s early youth. On the
17th of October, 1781, Lord Hawke, the victor of Quiberon Bay, and the
last of the great line of seamen of whom Admiral Blake was the first,
died, leaving, as Horace Walpole said the next day in the House of
Commons, his mantle to nobody.
Apparently, there was no one worthy to wear it. The fortunes of England
were indeed at a low ebb. Both her naval and military prestige had very
seriously declined. The American colonies had been lost by the worst
of statesmanship at home and the worst of bungling incompetence and
cowardice abroad. We had been beaten by the raw colonists on land and
by the French and Dutch at sea.
At home the very highest circles of the realm were polluted by such
corruption and crippled by such imbecility as would be absolutely
incredible to us now, Imagine, for instance, what would be thought
to-day of the post of Secretary of State for War being given to a man
who had been explicitly declared by a court martial to be absolutely
incapable of serving his country in any military capacity!--and yet
this is only one example out of many of the flagrant abuses of this
amazingly disgraceful period.
Happily, however, for the honour of the race and the safety of the
Empire there had been born, twenty-three years before to a country
parson in Norfolk, a boy, the fifth in a family of eleven, who fourteen
years later was destined to die in the moment of victory, happy in the
knowledge that he had not left his country a single enemy to fight
throughout the length and breadth of the High Seas. When Horace Walpole
spoke his panegyric on Lord Hawke he would probably have been very much
surprised if he had been told that it was this then insignificant and
unknown cousin of his own who was not only to take up the mantle of the
hero of Quiberon, but to bequeath it in his turn, not to a rival or a
successor, but to the country which his last triumph left mistress of
the seas.
Although there doesn’t seem to be any direct proof, it may be admitted
that there is sufficiently strong presumption to warrant us in
believing, if we choose to do so, that Horatio Nelson, son of the Rev.
Edmund Nelson, Rector of Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk, could one way or
another have traced a lineage back to the old Sea Kings of the North.
Certainly he must have had some of the blood of those who fought
the Armada in his veins, and it is noteworthy that a Danish poet in
celebrating his valour, wisdom, and clemency during and after the great
battle of Copenhagen, attempted to soothe the wounded pride of his
countrymen by pointing out that Nelson was indubitably a Danish name
and that after all they had only been beaten by the descendant of one
of their old Sea Kings.
But however this may be, the immediate facts all show that the man who
crowned and completed the work which Francis Drake and his brother
pirates began came of a stock that seemed to promise but little in the
way of hereditary battle-winning.
Every one on his father’s side appears either to have been a parson or
to have married one. His mother’s father was a parson too, but happily
she had a brother Maurice who was a captain in the Navy, and had done
some very good work at a time when good work was badly wanted.
This gallant sailor was a great grand-nephew of Sir John Suckling,
the poet, and it may be noticed, in passing, that on the 21st of
October, 1757, the day which we now know as the anniversary of
Trafalgar--Captain Maurice Suckling in the _Dreadnought_, in company
with two other sixty-gun ships, attacked seven large French men-of-war
off Cape François in the West Indies, and gave them such a hammering
that they were very thankful for the wind which enabled them to escape.
But still more noteworthy is the opinion of Captain Maurice Suckling of
his nephew when he first received his father’s request to give him a
place on board his ship.
“What,” he wrote in reply to the application, “has poor Horatio done,
who is so weak, that he above all the rest should be sent to rough it
out at sea? But let him come, and the first time we go into action a
cannon-ball may knock off his head and provide for him at once.”
The weakness here somewhat grimly alluded to was the curse of Nelson’s
existence from the day that he first set foot on the deck of a ship to
the moment when the bullet from the mizen-top of the _Redoubtable_ made
his almost constant bodily suffering a matter of minutes.
His physical infirmities, or at any rate the weakness of his body
as compared with the vast strength and tireless energy of his mind,
bring him into very close relationship with William of Orange. Putting
nationality aside, he was, in fact, on the sea what William was on
land, and the central point in his policy was also the same--tireless
and unsparing hostility to France.
With Nelson, indeed, this appears to have gone very near to the borders
of fanaticism. Some of his sayings with regard to the Frenchmen of his
day are absolutely ferocious. Hatred and contempt are about equally
blended in them. “Hate a Frenchman as you would hate the devil!” was
with him an axiom and was his usual form of advice to midshipmen on
entering the service.
On one occasion in the Mediterranean he said to one of his captains who
had got into a dispute about the property which the defeated French
garrison at Gaieta were to be allowed to take away with them:
“I am sorry that you had any altercation with them. There is no way to
deal with a Frenchman but to knock him down. To be civil to him is only
to be laughed at when they are enemies.”
The same spirit breathes through nearly all his letters. Thus, for
instance, he concluded a letter to the British Minister at Vienna with
these words: “_Down, down with the French_ ought to be written in the
council-room of every country in the world, and may Almighty God give
right thoughts to every sovereign is my constant prayer.”
He seems to have had respect for every other enemy that he met; but for
the French he had nothing save contemptuous and unsparing hostility.
“Close with a Frenchman, but out-manœuvre a Russian” was another of his
favourite sayings. This, it is to be hoped, is all past and gone; but
it is instructive as giving us the key, not only to Nelson’s policy,
but also to that spirit which made the British man-of-warsmen of the
day absolutely prefer to fight the French at long odds than on even
terms.
It was this spirit which was embodied in another of Nelson’s pet
phrases: “Any Englishman is worth three Frenchmen.” Of course that
would be all nonsense now; but in justice to our neighbours it ought to
be remembered that the Frenchmen whom Nelson and his sailors met and
conquered were the worst and not the best of their nation.
The old navy of France, the navy which had commanded the Eastern
Seas in the days of Clive and which had with impunity insulted the
English shores and brought an invading force into Ireland in the time
of William the Third no longer existed. It had been essentially an
aristocratic service like our own, its officers were gentlemen and
thorough sailors, and its seamen were brave, disciplined, and obedient.
But in her blood-drunkenness France had either murdered or banished
nearly every man who was fit to command a ship or who knew how to
point a gun. The fleets of revolutionary France were for the most part
commanded by ignoramuses or poltroons, or both, and manned by a rabble
who had neither stamina, training, or discipline.
Without the slightest wish to detract from the splendour of the
victories of Nelson or his comrades, I still think it is only fair to
point out again, as has once or twice been done before, that when we
read of French Admirals declining battle even when they had superior
force, or of running away before the battle was over, or of a small
British squadron crumpling up a whole fleet with very trifling loss to
itself, we ought to remember that the French Admirals had little or no
confidence in their officers, while the officers had still less either
in their admirals or their men.
On the other hand, such a man as Nelson, Collingwood, or Hardy had
simply to say that he was going to do a certain thing to convince every
one serving under him that it was about as good as already done.
This brings me naturally to one of Nelson’s most striking
characteristics. No man who rose to distinction in the Navy was ever
guilty of so many barefaced acts of insubordination as he was. Happily
for him and for us his disobedience or neglect of orders was always
justified by victory. The genius for supreme command, which was far
and away the strongest point in his character, manifested itself very
early in his career. The event proved that he was the superior of every
naval officer then afloat, whether admiral or midshipman, and he seemed
instinctively to know it.
When he was commanding the old _Agamemnon_ in the Mediterranean, at
the time when it was in dispute whether Corsica should fall under the
rule of France or Britain, he fought two French ships, the _Ça Ira_
and the _Sans Culottes_, for a whole day and beat them. The next day a
sort of general action was fought, Admiral Hotham being in command of
the British fleet. Nelson naturally wanted a fight to a finish, but
the Admiral was content with the capture of two ships and the flight of
the rest, and in reply to Nelson’s remonstrances he said: “We must be
contented. We have done very well.”
In a letter home on the subject of this action, Nelson penned
a sentence which was at once prophetic in itself and closely
characteristic of the writer. It was this: “I wish to be an Admiral and
in command of the English fleet. I should very soon either do much or
be ruined. My disposition cannot bear tame and slow measures. Sure I am
had I commanded on the 14th, that either the whole French fleet would
have graced my triumph or I should have been in a confounded scrape.”
That is Nelson’s mental portrait drawn by himself. No half measures
would ever do for him, and in most of the letters that he sent home
from his various scenes of action, whether they were written to his
wife, his private friends, or the Lords of the Admiralty, we find
the constant complaint, made with an insistence amounting almost to
petulance, that when he saw complete triumph within his grasp his
superiors either would not help him to secure it or forced him to be
content with a mere temporary advantage.
Under such circumstances it was only natural that such a man should now
and then break loose. He saw quite plainly that there were confused
councils at home, and timid tactics afloat. He saw also that under
Napoleon the power of France was growing every day.
The Board of Admiralty was apparently both corrupt and incompetent. The
Mediterranean fleet had been so shamefully neglected that after Nelson
had fought an action off Toulon even he was afraid to risk another
without the certainty of victory because there was “not so much as
a mast to be had east of Gibraltar,” and he could not possibly have
re-fitted his ships. It was about this time that he said in one of his
letters home:
“I am acting, not only without the orders of my commander-in-chief, but
in some measure contrary to him.”
If the authorities at home had only had the same opinion of his
abilities as those had who were able to watch his operations on the
spot, and particularly in Italy, it is quite possible that the whole
history of Europe might have been changed and that Napoleon would never
have won that series of brilliant victories which cost such an infinity
of blood and treasure, and which bore no fruits but such as resembled
all too closely the fabled Dead Sea apples.
Nelson’s patriotism may have been of a somewhat narrow-minded order,
and his hatred of the French may have partaken somewhat of the nature
of bigotry, but there can be no doubt that he was the one man in Europe
who saw what was coming and had the ability, if he had only had the
power, to save the world from the horrors of the Napoleonic wars.
Thus, for instance, if his advice had been taken, the splendid victory
of Aboukir Bay might have been turned into the decisive battle of the
war which only ended with Waterloo. As it was, he to some extent took
the law into his own hands. He saw perfectly well that Napoleon’s
ultimate point of attack was not Egypt but India. He sent an officer
with dispatches to the Governor of Bombay, advising him of the defeat
of the French Fleet, and in this dispatch he said:
“I know that Bombay was their first object if they could get there, but
I trust that now Almighty God will overthrow in Egypt these pests of
the human race. Buonaparte has never yet had to contend with an English
officer, and I shall endeavour to make him respect us.”
In another dispatch to the Admiralty he taught a lesson which we have
only lately begun to learn. In those days of the old wooden-walls the
handy, light-heeled frigate was to the ships of the line what the swift
cruisers of to-day are to the big battleships. They were the eyes
and ears of the fleet, and they could be sent on errands which were
impossible to the huge three-deckers. After the battle of the Nile was
won he said in this dispatch:
“Were I to die this moment _want of frigates_ would be found stamped
on my heart. No words of mine can express what I have suffered, and am
suffering, for want of them.”
The inner meaning of these bitter words was one of vast importance,
not only to Britain, but to all Europe. They meant really that the
most splendid victory that had so far been won at sea had been robbed
of half its results. For want of the lighter craft, even of a few
bomb-vessels and fire-ships which he had implored the authorities to
send him, Napoleon’s store-ships and transports in the harbour of
Alexandria escaped attack and certain destruction.
Their destruction would have enabled Nelson to carry out the policy
which his genius had told him was the only true one to pursue at this
momentous crisis. He would have cut off Napoleon’s communications and
deprived him of his supplies. Then he would have blockaded the Egyptian
Coast and left the future conqueror of Austerlitz to perish amidst the
sands of Egypt. As he said to himself: “To Egypt they went with their
own consent, and there they shall remain while Nelson commands this
squadron--for never, never will he consent to the return of one ship or
Frenchman. I wish them to perish in Egypt and give an awful lesson to
the world of the justice of the Almighty.”
This was a pitiless pronouncement, but no one who has read the history
of the Napoleonic wars can doubt the accuracy of Nelson’s foresight or
the true humanity of his policy, for, if this had happened only a few
thousands out of the five million lives which these wars are computed
to have cost would have been lost. There would have been no Austerlitz,
or Wagram, or Jena for France to boast of; but, on the other hand,
there would have been no Leipsic, no Moscow, and no Waterloo.
As usual, however, Nelson, although he had magnificently restored the
credit of the British arms at sea, was crippled by shortness of means
and baulked by the stupidity and incompetence of his masters at home.
Sir Sidney Smith’s policy was preferred to his, with the result that
Napoleon was permitted to desert his army and live to become the curse
of Europe for the next seventeen years.
But, if he did not do all he wanted to do, when Nelson won the battle
of the Nile he completely established his claim to be considered one
of the Empire-makers of Britain, for if he had not followed the French
with that unerring judgment of his, and if he had not, in defiance of
all accepted naval tactics, attacked them in what was considered to be
an unassailable position--that is to say, moored off shore in two lines
with both ends protected by batteries--all the work that Clive and
Hastings had done in India might have been undone, and, considering the
miserable state of our national defences, we might either have lost
India or had to wage such an exhausting war for it that we could not
possibly have taken the decisive share that we afterwards did in the
overthrow of the French power.
As he said in one of his most famous utterances while the British fleet
was streaming into the bay: “Where there is room for a Frenchman to
swing, there is room for an Englishman to get alongside him.”
That was Nelson. His idea was always to get alongside, to get as close
as possible to the enemy and to hit him as hard as he could. Mere
defeat was not enough for him. He wanted a fight to a finish, the
finish being the absolute destruction or capture of the hostile force.
This was not because there was anything particularly ferocious in his
nature. On the contrary, a more tender-hearted man never lived.
Before that one defeat of his at Teneriffe when he lost his arm, he
wrote to his Commander-in-chief--this letter, by the way, was the last
he ever wrote with his right hand--expressing solicitude for everybody
but himself. None knew better than he the desperate nature of the
venture, for in this very letter he said that on the morrow his head
would probably be crowned either with laurel or cypress, and the last
thing he did before he left his ship was to call his stepson to help
him in burning his wife’s letters, and then ordered him to remain
behind, saying: “Should we both fall, what would become of your poor
mother?”
Happily Lieutenant Nisbet disobeyed the order to his face and went.
When the bullet shattered Nelson’s arm at the elbow, it was his stepson
who had the presence of mind to whip off his silk handkerchief and bind
it round above the wound. But for this, Nelson would never have fought
another battle, for he must have bled to death before he reached his
ship.
It so happened that he could have been put much sooner on board the
_Sea Horse_, but her commander, Captain Freemantle, was still on shore,
and, for all he knew, might be dead or alive. His wife was on board
the _Sea Horse_, and Nelson, wounded and bleeding as he was, insisted
on going on, saying: “I would rather suffer death than alarm Mrs.
Freemantle by letting her see me in this state when I can give her no
tidings of her husband.” Freemantle, as it turned out, had been wounded
in almost exactly the same place only a few minutes before.
When Nelson got back to his own ship, he would not hear of being slung
or carried up on deck.
“I’ve got one arm and two legs left,” he said, “and I’ll get up by
myself.”
And so he did, and up a single rope at that. In a strong man this
would have been wonderful; in a mere weakling as Nelson physically was,
it was little short of a miracle.
This was the man who, in the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, with an
utterly disabled ship, boarded and took two Spanish men-of-war both
bigger than his own. One of them had eighty and the other a hundred and
twelve guns; his own only mounted seventy-four.
It is, of course, entirely out of the question that in such a mere
sketch as this I should attempt to follow Nelson through even a
moderate proportion of the hundred and five engagements in which he
personally fought, nor would it be fitting that I should attempt to
emulate the brilliant and detailed descriptions which have illustrated
the principal of them.
With his doings at Naples and Palermo, and his much-debated and
inexplicable attachment to Lady Hamilton which unhappily began during
this period, we have here no concern. The hero of the Nile, like every
other great man, had his faults. Those who cavil at them are really
blaming their possessors for not being perfect, for if really great
men had no faults they would be perfect, and that is impossible,
and, so much being said, the scene may now shift forthwith from the
Mediterranean to the Baltic.
The Armed Neutrality is now only a phrase in history, but in the year
1801 it was a very serious reality. It was a league between Russia,
Sweden, and Denmark. From the English point of view it meant this--that
France, with whom we had now practically embarked in a struggle to the
death, would be able, under the sanction of this league, to import from
the shores of the Baltic the very articles that we did not wish her to
have, and which she couldn’t get elsewhere. These were naval stores,
pine-trees for masts and spars, hemp for rigging, tar, and so on.
It was very easy to see that this Armed Neutrality meant in plain
English that these three Powers were quite agreeable to the smashing-up
of Great Britain by France provided that they were not called upon to
pay any of the expenses or suffer any of the other losses of the war.
Denmark was therefore politely but firmly requested to detach herself
from this league, the reason being that Denmark in those days kept
the key of the Baltic. Denmark refused, and unhappily for her she did
so just at the time when the Victor of the Nile had come home for a
well-earned holiday.
We are not accustomed now, in the pride of our unequalled naval
strength, to take very much account of the fleets of these three
countries, but just before the Battle of the Baltic was fought it was a
very different matter.
The Danes had twenty-three line-of-battle ships and thirty-one
frigates, not counting bomb-vessels and guard-ships. Sweden had
eighteen ships of the line, fourteen frigates and sloops and
seventy-four galleys, as well as a small swarm of gun-boats, while
Russia could put to sea eighty-two line-of-battle ships and forty-two
frigates.
Such a force within the narrow waters of the Baltic was a very
formidable one, but before we can arrive at a just appreciation of
the magnificence and importance of the service which Nelson did for
his country we must remember that of all European waters those of the
Baltic, and especially of the approaches to it, are the most difficult
and dangerous. Even with the aid of steam it would be no light matter
to take a fleet into the Baltic under the guns of Elsinore and Kronberg
were the lamps of the lighthouses extinguished and all the buoys
removed.
What then must it have been to go in with a fleet of sailing ships
utterly at the mercy of wind and current, to say nothing of the ice?
Indeed, Southey tells us that when Nelson went to Yarmouth to join the
fleet under Admiral Sir Hyde-Parker he found him a little nervous about
dark nights and ice-floes.
His own remarks on the subject are very well worthy of remembrance:
“These are not times for nervous systems,” he said. “I hope we shall
give our northern enemies that hailstorm of bullets which gives our
dear country the dominion of the sea. We have it and all the devils in
the North cannot take it from us if our wooden walls have fair play.”
It was a most egregious mistake not to have made the Victor of the
Nile and the Conqueror of the Mediterranean commander-in-chief of the
Northern Squadron. His fame was already resounding through the world,
and every one except the Lords of the Admiralty seems to have already
recognised the fact that he was by far the finest sailor of the age.
Here again, too, officialism at home sadly crippled the work of valour
and genius abroad. As usual Nelson had his own plans, and as usual
they were the very best possible. His idea was to attack the Russian
Squadron in Reval and the Danish in Copenhagen simultaneously, and by
preventing their coalition make it too risky for the Swedes to join in.
Captain Mahan, who is certainly entitled to be considered one of the
foremost naval authorities of the day, describes Nelson’s plan of
attack as worthy of Napoleon himself, and says that if adopted it
“would have brought down the Baltic Confederacy with a crash that would
have resounded throughout Europe.” As it was, more timid counsels
prevailed, but thanks to Nelson the end was the same, or nearly so.
We may gather some notion of the difficulty of getting on to the scene
of battle when we read that no less than three English line-of-battle
ships went aground before the battle began, and we also get an
interesting glimpse of that old hand-to-hand style of naval warfare
which has now passed away for ever, when we are told that the ships
opened fire at a range of two hundred yards! Nowadays firing would
begin at between three and four thousand. If two modern fleets were to
get to business at that range the said business would probably consist
of one broadside from each, one discharge of the big guns, and after
that general wreck and ruin. It is not likely that either side would
win, and it is certain that both sides would lose.
From ten to one the battle raged fast and furious, and so much damage
had been done on the English side that Sir Hyde-Parker made a signal
to leave off action. It was at this moment that Nelson uttered those
immortal words, which were destined to be as famous even as his signal
at Trafalgar:
“What? Leave off action? No, damn me if I do! You know, Foley, I have
a right to be blind sometimes. No, I really don’t see the signal. Fire
away!”
Those were days of hard swearing as well as hard hitting, and,
considering all the circumstances, even the purest of modern purists
may forgive a little vehemence of expression to the man who that day
did such good work, not only for our grandfathers, but for us and our
children.
[Illustration: NELSON AT COPENHAGEN.]
An hour or so later Nelson performed one of the most memorable actions
even of his life. The Danish ships and floating batteries were moored
in-shore. The fire of the English guns was, as usual, terribly
accurate, but as fast as the Danes were shot down, fresh crews were put
on board the ships, and Nelson very soon saw that this simply meant
butchery as long as a Danish ship floated.
Consequently he sat down and wrote a note to the Crown Prince of
Denmark which he sent on shore under a flag of truce. This was the
letter:
“Lord Nelson has directions to spare Denmark when no longer resisting,
but if the firing is continued on the part of Denmark, Lord Nelson
will be obliged to set on fire all the floating batteries he has taken
without having the power of saving the brave Danes who have defended
them.”
The result of this letter was a truce, and the truce led to an
armistice and the separation of Denmark from the Armed Neutrality.
This was very different treatment, we may well imagine, to anything
that the French might have expected. In their case he considered
extermination to be the only remedy for the disease which in his eyes
they represented on earth.
It was curious that after such a day’s work this man, who had probably
saved Europe from one of the greatest menaces that ever threatened it,
should go back to his cabin and copy out love verses to send to Lady
Hamilton--and yet that is just what he did, and at the end of them he
wrote: “_St. George_, April 2nd, 1801, at 9 o’clock at night. Very
tired after a hard fought battle.”
The Battle of Copenhagen and the death of the Tsar Paul put an end
to the Northern Confederacy and to all the hopes of France in that
direction. But Nelson was not satisfied, for the Russian fleet had
escaped. He was, however, in some measure consoled by the recall of
Sir Hyde-Parker and the realisation of his old ambition by his own
appointment as commander-in-chief.
His next service was as commander of a sort of patrol fleet on the East
Coast. Those were the days of the great invasion scare. Nelson never
believed in it. In one of his letters to Lord Addington on the subject
he said:
“What a forlorn undertaking! It is perfectly right to be prepared
against a mad government, but with the active force your lordship has
given me I may pronounce it impracticable.”
Soon after this, preliminaries of peace were signed, and to Nelson’s
intense disgust the French Ambassador was enthusiastically received in
London. Writing to his physician soon after he said:
“Can you cure madness? for I am mad that our damned scoundrels dragged
the Frenchman’s carriage. I am ashamed for my country.”
The Peace was hollow and brief, for the mastery of the sea was not
yet decided, and by the middle of 1803 we find Nelson back in the
Mediterranean, not blockading Toulon, but rather trying to tempt the
French out to a battle.
He even went so far as to appear to run away, and the French Admiral,
Latouche-Treville, promptly wrote a letter giving a most glowing
account of how he had chased the English away from Toulon. The idea of
a Frenchman daring to say such a thing naturally made Nelson furious.
Writing about it to his brother he said:
“If this fleet gets fairly up with M. Latouche his letter with all his
ingenuity must be different from his last. We had fancied that we had
chased him into Toulon, but from the time of his meeting Captain Hawker
of the _Isis_ I never heard of his acting otherwise than as a poltroon
and a liar. I am keeping his letter, and if I take him by God he shall
eat it.”
This amiable design, however, the French Admiral baulked by dying, and
when Nelson heard the news he remarked half-angrily: “He is gone, and
all his lies with him.”
That is what he thought of the Admiral. This is what he thought of the
fleet: “The French fleet yesterday was to appearance in high feather
and as fine as paint could make them. Our weather-beaten ships, I have
no fear, will make their sides like a plum-pudding.”
The interval between the ending of the Toulon blockade and the
Battle of Trafalgar was filled chiefly by what may be described as
a huge naval hunt. On the one hand, there were three French fleets
manœuvring to get out and come together in the Channel with the object
of overwhelming any English force that might try to prevent the
embarkation of the Grand Army at Boulogne. But they had another object,
and that was to get as far as possible out of Nelson’s way.
The first idea was to make a feint at the West Indies, and so away went
Admiral Villeneuve with his fleet across the Atlantic, and away went
Nelson post-haste after him. He got to the West Indies only to find
that the Frenchmen had doubled on their tracks and gone back again, and
so he immediately turned the prows of his weather-beaten and almost
unseaworthy ships to the eastward, and for the second time chased the
French across the Atlantic. But he missed them again, and on July 20,
1805, Nelson made an entry in his diary to the effect that he had that
day gone ashore at Gibraltar--the first time that he had left the
_Victory_ for two years all but ten days!
From Gibraltar he came home and spent a few weeks of rest at Merton,
the estate which he had bought in Surrey. During this time a momentous
naval duel was fought in the Channel. Admiral Villeneuve had sent some
very important dispatches containing the plans for the concentration
of the French and Spanish fleets to the commander of the Rochefort
squadron by the _Didon_, a forty-four-gun frigate; but on her way the
_Didon_ was met by the _Phœnix_, an English forty-gun frigate which,
after the fashion of the times, proceeded to pound her to helplessness,
then ran alongside and carried her by the board in the good old
style. The result of this was that Villeneuve gave up all hope of the
concentration and retreated to Cadiz, where he anchored on August 17th.
Admiral Collingwood, in command of the Atlantic squadron, at once
sent off the frigate _Euryalus_ home with news. She dropped anchor at
Spithead on the 1st of September. At five o’clock the next morning her
captain presented himself at Merton and found Nelson already up and
dressed. The moment Captain Blackwood entered the room Nelson’s face
lit up and he said:
“I’m sure you bring me news of the French and Spanish fleets and
I think I shall have to give them a beating yet. Depend upon it,
Blackwood, I shall yet give Mr. Villeneuve a drubbing.”
He left for London the same day to consult with the Admiralty, and it
was on one of the visits that he then paid to the Secretary of State
that he met for a few minutes--and for the only time in his life--the
man whose name was destined to be linked with his in everlasting fame.
This was Arthur Wellesley, some day to be Duke of Wellington, who was
to do for the French on land what Nelson had been doing for them at sea.
Sir Arthur came away with a curious opinion of the little, pale,
nervous, fidgety, one-armed man, who had won the two greatest battles
in the history of naval warfare, and was about to surpass himself by
winning yet a greater one.
From one point of view he was a vain, boastful, and somewhat womanish
little man. From another, he was not only a great leader of men, but
a statesman to boot. On the whole, the future Iron Duke came to the
conclusion that the Hero of the Nile was “a very superior person.”
Nelson’s opinion of Wellington is unhappily lost to posterity. One can
imagine the sort of language he would have used if any one had told him
that a soldier had ventured to call him “a superior person.”
“For charity’s sake, send us Lord Nelson, ye men of power.” Such
was the prayer of Captain Codrington of the _Orion_, serving with
Collingwood’s fleet off Cadiz. But by the time this letter got home
Nelson was with the fleet, and it is worthy of note that he reached the
last and most glorious of his hundred battlefields on his birthday, the
twenty-ninth of September.
The first thing that he did was to send home for more ships, not
because he wasn’t ready to fight the French with what he had, but
simply in pursuance of his constant policy with regard to them. In his
dispatch to the Admiralty he said:
“Should they come out, I shall immediately bring them to battle, but
though I should not doubt of spoiling any voyage they may attempt, yet
I hope for the arrival of the ships from England that as an enemy’s
fleet they may be annihilated.”
In a private letter which he wrote at the same time he said:
“It is annihilation that the country wants and not merely a splendid
victory of twenty-three to thirty-six--honourable to the parties
concerned, but absolutely useless in the extended scale to bring
Buonaparte to his marrow-bones. Numbers can only annihilate. Therefore
I hope the Admiralty will send the fixed force as soon as possible.”
He hoped for forty sail of the line, but when the ever memorable
morning of the 21st had dawned he was only able to muster twenty-seven
against thirty-three. At half-past eleven the famous signal: “England
expects that every man will do his duty!” flew from the main-royal of
the _Victory_.
I have no intention of attempting to re-write the thousand-times told
tale of Trafalgar or of the disaster which plunged the nation into
mourning in the midst of the exultation of triumph, for to do so would
be alike superfluous and impertinent. Let it be enough to point out
that the firing of the first gun marked the moment that Nelson had
lived and fought for.
He was Commander-in-chief, as he had so often prayed to be, of the
British Fleet, and there in front of him was the last fleet of any
strength that his hated enemy France could muster. The battle, like the
triumph, was his and his alone. Every man who that day did his duty
fought by Nelson’s directions and, as it were, under Nelson’s eye, and
never was victory more complete or defeat more crushing.
When it was over eighteen out of the thirty-three French and Spanish
ships had been captured, and finally only eleven got back to Cadiz so
shattered that they never again took the sea as men-of-war.
The crowning triumph of Nelson’s life left Britain without a rival so
far as the mastery of the sea was concerned and threw the way open for
conquest and colonisation in all parts of the world. Well might the
great Admiral say when he lay dying in Captain Hardy’s arms: “Thank
God, I’ve done my duty!”
No man ever died with nobler or more truly spoken words on his lips
than these, for he had not only given his country the empire of the
sea, but he had saved her from invasion by one who was perhaps the
greatest military genius the world has known.
On the heights above Boulogne there stands a tall column surmounted
by a figure of Napoleon. It was raised to commemorate the assembly of
the Grand Army--that army which during the next ten years swept in an
irresistible torrent of conquest from one end of Europe to the other.
Napoleon’s back is turned on the white cliffs of England. If Nelson had
never lived, he might have been facing the other way.
X
_WELLINGTON_
“_THE PRIDE AND THE GENIUS OF HIS COUNTRY._”
--QUEEN VICTORIA.
X
WELLINGTON
There is a very considerable amount of uncertainty, and there are
also a few somewhat remarkable coincidences associated with the early
youth of Arthur Wesley, better known to fame under the expanded form
Wellesley, son of Garret, Earl of Mornington, and his wife Ann Hill,
one of the daughters of Lord Dungannon.
It is somewhat singular, for instance, that the birthday of a child
born in such a position should not be known within a day or two. His
mother, who ought to have spoken with authority, said that the future
conqueror of the great Napoleon entered the world on May-Day, 1769.
The date on his baptismal certificate is the 30th of May, and
twenty-one years later a committee of the Irish House of Commons, to
which he had just been elected, investigated the question on a petition
which sought to show that he was not of full age, and this committee
decided that he was born on or before the 29th of April. With regard
to this latter date, however, it has been suggested that with the
money and influence that he had behind him there would have been no
difficulty in getting the Irish Parliament of those days to make him
any age that he pleased.
But these things are only trifles. The fact of moment to the world is
that Arthur Wellesley managed to get born into the world some three
months before a certain other boy-baby was born at Ajaccio in Corsica.
No one, of course, dreamt then that these two babies were going to grow
up into Titans whose final struggle for the mastery of Europe was to
shake the world forty-six years later.
There is perhaps no more noteworthy coincidence in modern history
than the fact that Nelson, Wellington, and Napoleon should all have
been born about the same time--for without Nelson’s victories at sea,
Napoleon would in all probability have been irresistible on land,
while, without Wellington’s splendid conduct of the Peninsular War, the
crowning victory of Waterloo would perhaps never have been won, and so
at least half the effects of Nelson’s hundred and five fights would
have been destroyed.
This is all the more singular from the fact that nothing within the
limits of human probability save the supreme genius and individual
capacity of this Englishman and this Anglo-Irishman could possibly have
stemmed the tide of Napoleonic conquest.
As I have pointed out in another of these sketches, the last decade but
one of the eighteenth century was one of disaster and degradation for
this country both at home and abroad. The national strength was sapped
by corruption, and the national spirit was daunted by defeat.
The history of the next thirty or forty years distinctly shows that we
had but one Nelson at sea, and but one Wellington on land. If they had
been born a quarter of a century later, or even if they had not both
come into the world about the same time as their mighty antagonist, the
map of Europe would certainly be very different to what it is to-day,
and it is also fairly safe to say that the map of the world would not
now show nearly as much red as it does.
Arthur Wellesley, like certain others of our Empire-Makers who will
be remembered, was a delicate, weakly boy and also, curiously enough,
a dunce at school. As far as we know he was first sent to a school at
Chelsea, whence in due course he went to Eton. Now there came a time
when Eton was very proud indeed of being his Alma-Mater; but when she
came to look back to see if she could remember anything about him she
found that his career was absolutely undistinguished.
There was only one incident in it all that any one remembered, and that
was a fight that he had had with one Bob or “Bobus” Smith, of whom also
nothing is known save the fact that he had a brother who was afterwards
known to the world as Sydney Smith--not the defender of Acre, but the
clerical humourist who divided the human race into three sexes: Men,
women, and curates.
It would seem that he was all along intended for the army, for when his
undistinguished career at Eton had closed he went to a French military
school at Angers, somewhere about the same time that a certain young
cadet of Artillery was beginning to learn his business in Toulon. Here,
again, we get very dim glimpses of the future conqueror, Empire-Maker,
and preserver. One of them, however, is fairly distinct. He had a
little terrier called Vick to which he was a great deal more attentive
than he was to his studies and which repaid his attention by constant
and unswerving devotion.
When he left Angers is not known to a year or so, but in 1787 we come
across something definite, for in this year Arthur Wesley, as he still
spelt himself, was gazetted as ensign to His Majesty’s 73rd Regiment of
Foot.
He now stood on the lowest of the gentlemanly rungs of the military
ladder and his upward progress was for a time somewhat bewildering.
Those were the days when money and social and political influence,
which came to about the same thing, did everything in the Army, the
Navy, the Church, and everywhere else, and, curiously enough, this
apparently absurd system produced the finest array of soldiers and
sailors that has ever adorned the annals of our empire. There are,
indeed, certain blasphemers who venture to suggest that it worked
quite as well as our much-boasted compound of mechanical cramming and
competitive examination does now.
But, be this as it may, Arthur Wesley’s first steps up the ladder were
distinctly erratic. First he became a lieutenant of the 76th and 41st,
then a sub. in the 12th Light Dragoons, then a captain in the 58th
Foot, then captain of the 18th Light Dragoons, and so on till by the
autumn of 1793, when he had reached the mature age of twenty-four, he
was gazetted lieutenant-colonel of the 33rd Foot.
There were two reasons for this rapid promotion. The first undoubtedly
is the fact that his elder brother Richard was now Earl of Mornington
and a wealthy man and a social power to boot. The second, as Mr. George
Hooper in his excellent biography suggests, is probably the perception
by his brother of qualities which so far nobody else had discovered.
How far his Lordship was justified was speedily shown when in
1793--which the historical reader will note was the date of the driving
out of the English and Royalists from Toulon by the well-directed guns
of Citizen Buonaparte--he was given the command of the 33rd Foot. A few
months later the 33rd was officially recognised as the most effective
regiment on the Irish establishment.
The next year Lieutenant-Colonel Wesley saw his first active service.
It was not an encouraging experience, but it was sufficient to show the
sort of stuff that the future Iron Duke was made of. The allied armies
in the Netherlands, with the English under the Duke of York among them,
were retreating after a series of disasters before the triumphant
onrush of the French legions.
Near the town of Boxtell the retreat began to get uncomfortably like
a rout. Horse and foot were getting mixed up in a narrow lane and the
French, seeing this, were getting ready to charge into them; whereupon
Colonel Wesley planted his men skilfully across the mouth of the lane
and, when the French charged, the well-drilled 33rd stood so steadily
and used their muskets with such deadly precision that the French
thought better of it and the pursuit stopped there and then.
That was the young Colonel’s first experience of actual war. It was
also the first check the French had so far received in the Netherlands,
which is also significant in the light of after events.
After that he commanded the rear-guard in the retreat to the British
transports at Bremen. He did his duty as well as the hopeless
carelessness and incompetency of those over and above him permitted.
“It was a perfect marvel,” he said afterwards, “how a single man of us
escaped,” from which it will be gathered that British military genius
and discipline were somewhat at a discount during the campaign which
we may regard as the prelude to the stupendous struggle which was to
culminate on the field of Waterloo.
When Colonel Wesley got home he did a very curious thing. He asked to
be allowed to resign his commission and to be given some post, however
humble, in the Civil Service. It is easy to see from his letter of
application to Lord Camden that he was utterly disgusted with the Army,
or rather with the way in which it was mismanaged. He also felt, as
he distinctly says, that he had in him the makings of a successful
financier, and certainly if great business capacity, instantaneous
knowledge of men, unequalled power of organisation, and absolutely
tireless energy are the principal requisites for commercial success,
Arthur Wesley might have died a millionaire.
Happily, however, Lord Camden refused to grant his request. No doubt
the Earl of Mornington had something to say about it and good officers
were quite rare enough just then to make the abilities of the Colonel
of the 33rd fairly conspicuous. Soon after this he had an attack of
yellow fever in Ireland, probably by infection, which very nearly
killed him. Just at this time too, that is to say the end of 1795, an
expedition was organised to the West Indies and the 33rd were to form
part of it.
It is interesting to us with our wind-defying monsters of steel and
steam to learn that the squadron tried for six weeks to get out of
the Channel and then had to come back. By this time the destination
of the expedition had been changed from the West to the East Indies.
The Colonel of the 33rd was too ill to sail with his regiment. A swift
frigate enabled him to overtake it at the Cape; but for all that he was
nearly thirteen months before he got to Calcutta.
Arthur Wellesley, as he now began to sign himself, although nothing
more in the eyes of his comrades and commanders than a Colonel of Foot
who was a good disciplinarian and a promising soldier, had now entered
that theatre on the stage of which he was to play a brilliant part to a
world-wide audience.
Nearly thirteen years before Warren Hastings had finished his work and
gone home to take his reward in impeachment and ruin. The brilliant
administration of Lord Cornwallis and the less conspicuous rule of Sir
John Shore were now to be followed by a double command which was to
extend, complete, and crown the great work of empire-making in the East
which had begun when Robert Clive left his desk to go and capture Arcot.
A few weeks after Colonel Wellesley landed in Calcutta, his brilliant
brother, the Earl of Mornington took his seat on the Viceregal throne.
No happier combination could well have been possible. The elder brother
was a scholar, a statesman, and a broad-minded man of affairs. The
younger was, even then, the same man who won Vittoria, Talavera, and
Waterloo.
The two acted in perfect unison. There was none of that bungling
timidity and incompetency in high places which confused the counsels
and crippled the activity of Robert Clive and Warren Hastings, and the
result was, as might have been expected, a succession of triumphs won,
be it noted, not only by consummate generalship, but also by incessant
vigilance and hard work resulting in perfect organisation.
These triumphs culminated, as every one knows, in the crushing of
the Mahratta power--the last serious obstacle to the universality of
British rule in India--on the memorial field of Assaye.
It was a magnificent combination of courage, calculation, and
generalship. With a force of five thousand men and eighteen guns and
with only two thousand European troops in his army, Wellesley defeated
and utterly cut up an army of over forty thousand men and an artillery
force of a hundred guns, and these, too, were the finest native
fighting troops in the Peninsula. In less than three hours after the
first assault the five thousand had conquered the forty thousand and
captured a hundred and two guns and all the stores and ammunition,
and it should always be remembered that Assaye was a very different
business to Plassey. It was a battle, not a rout, a tragedy rather
than a farce. Of the two thousand Europeans over four hundred were
killed and wounded, and of the three thousand natives, who fought
magnificently as they have ever since done in company with British
troops, there were no less than sixteen hundred killed and wounded.
As for Wellesley himself, he was wherever he was wanted, and that was
usually in the thick of the fight. But there is another fact which
gives us a glimpse of the great general who was the master spirit of
the Peninsular Campaign. His men fought the battle of Assaye at the
end of a twenty-four mile march, and no military force that is not
commanded by a military genius could do that.
There were other actions after Assaye, but it was there that the final
blow was really struck. Holkar, it is true, had seemed to turn the tide
for the time, but in the December of 1804 General Lake finally crumpled
him up. In March, 1805, the Colonel of the 33rd, now Sir Arthur
Wellesley, sailed from Madras in the frigate _Tridant_. We may pause to
note that in the following July he wrote from the Island of St. Helena
to tell his brother that his health, which had been very bad, was now
restored.
He said: “I was wasting away daily, and latterly when at Madras, I
found my strength failed which had before held out.” If his strength
really had failed, it is quite probable that St. Helena would never
have known its most distinguished resident.
A short time after, Wellington returned to England--he was known just
then as the “Sepoy General”--William Pitt remarked that he was at a
loss which most to admire--his modesty or his talents, and he added
that “he had never met with any military officer with whom it was so
satisfactory to converse.” This was a saying both accurate and just,
and it must be admitted that there is a very considerable difference
between the dispatches which Nelson wrote and those which Wellington
sent home after his greatest victories.
It was during this brief stay at home that the one little romance of
Wellington’s life had a happy “finis” written to it. In the days before
he had given any public sign of the great genius that was in him, he
had wooed Lady Catherine Pakenham, a daughter of Lord Longford. Not
possibly without apparent reason, Lord and Lady Longford came to the
conclusion that he was an altogether ineligible person, and refused
their consent, and Arthur Wesley sailed away to the East, disconsolate
but not despairing.
It is pleasant to be able to look over his shoulder just before he
returned, and read a letter in which Lady Catherine tells him that
such beauty as she had has been ravaged by small-pox. It is pleasanter
still to know that this information by no means cooled his ardour to
get home, and that when he did come back a Major-General, the victor in
many fights, and Sir Arthur Wellesley, my Lord and my Lady had reversed
their decision, and the course of true love was allowed to run with
perfectly satisfactory smoothness.
Just before this he entered Parliament as member for Rye, on the
invitation of Lord Grenville. One didn’t need much more than the
invitation of a powerful minister to get into Parliament in those days.
At Westminster he distinguished himself chiefly as the vindicator of
his brother’s policy in India, and, more than this, he used his pen,
which was not much addicted to flourishes, but nevertheless wrote
good, strong, nervous English, to the same good purpose. There is one
sentence in an open letter to his brother which exactly sums up the
situation.
“By your firmness and decision you have not only saved, but enlarged
and secured the invaluable Empire entrusted to your government at a
time when everything else was a wreck, and the existence even of Great
Britain was problematic.”
Those are weighty words indeed, coming as they do from the man who won
the battle of Assaye and established, let us hope for ever, the British
Empire in India.
All the same he doesn’t seem to have liked this talking business in
Parliament at all, for in a letter written in July, 1806, he says:
“You will have seen that I am in Parliament, and a difficult and most
unpleasant game I have had to play in the present extraordinary state
of parties.” From this it will be seen that Arthur Wellesley, like any
other good man of action and capable Empire-Maker, had a wholesome
contempt for the miserable and sordid game which is called party
politics.
All the same we find him a few months afterwards as Chief Secretary
for Ireland, buying, that is to say bribing and corrupting with open
candour and unconcealed disgust, a sufficiency of votes and influence
to keep the Ministry in power. He said plainly: “Almost every man of
mark in the state has his price.” And when he was taxed with bribery
and corruption, he remarked with that marvellous insight of his, that
an inquiry into such practices would open up the whole theory of
constitutional government.
We are supposed to have improved ourselves out of the venality of
buying and selling votes and seats, at any rate for cash down, but
we still bribe and we still corrupt. There are still titles for rich
men who will spend lavishly to support their party, there are still
innumerable advantages for the tradesman, and the contractor who
are loyal to their party and their ticket, and so it will be while
constitutional government and human nature remain what they are; but
for all that we may learn a good deal from a remark like this made
by a man who was so absolutely incorruptible that when he was made
Captain-General of the Spanish Army, he refused to draw his salary, and
who later on when his justly grateful country presented him with an
estate, paid the rent of it into the Treasury as long as the war lasted.
It is not often, even among the great ones of the earth, that you meet
with an absolutely honest man, but there is no doubt about Wellington.
After a little subordinate foreign service in Denmark, in which he
distinguished himself as usual, he went back to the Irish office for
about eight months. This particular eight months was a very critical
period indeed, and looking back at the facts across a gulf of eighty
years, one is inclined to wonder how it was that no better work could
be found for the already well-proved genius of Arthur Wellesley than
the ordinary routine work which a very much smaller man could have
done, if not as well, at least sufficiently well. It will have been
noticed more than once by those who have managed to get through the
foregoing pages, that one of the greatest and most dangerous faults of
British officialism, has been the employment of giants to do the work
of pigmies. But officialism would not be official if it were not dull,
so I suppose there is no help for it. One of the elements of greatness
is the faculty of recognising greatness in others, and officialism is
very seldom great.
This was the year 1807, and that is the same thing as saying that it
was the period which marked the zenith of Napoleon’s power. The little
cadet of Artillery who had been teaching the raw republicans of France
how to construct fortifications, and how to knock them down, while
Arthur Wellesley was training the 33rd Foot, was now Emperor of the
French.
More than that, he was practically master of Europe. From the Atlantic
Ocean to the Ural mountains he had not a single foe left in arms.
Some he had crushed, others he had over-awed or conciliated, but all
the nations of Europe were either his subjects or his forced allies.
Nelson, it is true, had made Britain the mistress of the seas, but,
saving only these little islands of ours, it must be confessed that
Napoleon was master of the land.
There was, however, just one weak point, one loose joint, as it were,
in the armour of the conquering Colossus who now bestrode the Continent
from one end to the other.
If you take the map of Europe you will see that Portugal is a very
small patch on it, and yet if it had not been for Portugal being
just where it is, and if there had not been such a man as Sir Arthur
Wellesley ready to turn its geographical advantages to the best
possible use, Napoleon would very probably have ended his career on a
throne, instead of on that lonely island in the Atlantic.
This is not the place for me to attempt to redescribe the long glories
of the Peninsular War. In the first place, to do so would necessitate
more pages than I have paragraphs at my disposal; and, in the second
place, are they not already painted with a worthy splendour on the
glowing pages of Napier and Allison?
But what does fall within the scope of such a sketch as this is the
business of pointing out a fact which the school books say nothing
about. The work that Wellington did in the Peninsula was of two sorts.
He not only saw the weak joint in Napoleon’s armour and struck hard and
straight at it. He did a great deal more than that.
The genius of his combinations, the tenacity of his purpose, and that
inspired confidence which practically doubled the effectiveness of his
fighting force, compelled Napoleon to employ his greatest generals, and
some of his finest troops in the work of “flinging the English into the
sea,” as he himself phrased it.
“There is nothing,” he told his marshals over and over again, “there is
nothing to be reckoned with except the English.” And it may be added
that if the English had not been led by such a man as he who was now
Viscount Wellington and Baron Douro the reckoning might have been a
somewhat short one.
The actual effect of the Peninsular War and of Wellington’s genius
is not to be seen so much in the splendid triumphs of Vittoria and
Salamanca, or the awful slaughters of Albuera and Busaco. It is to be
found rather in the fact that Soult, Ney, and Masséna, the three finest
marshals of the Grand Army, were kept there, campaign after campaign,
fighting battle after battle, and suffering defeat after defeat, in the
hopeless effort to do what it was absolutely necessary to be done if
the conquests of Napoleon were to be anything more than a passing dream
of empire.
Thus, for instance, when at the end of the campaign of 1810, Masséna
finally retired upon Salamanca he had lost every fight in which he had
engaged, and the Grand Army was the poorer by no fewer than thirty
thousand men. We have simply to ask ourselves what Napoleon would have
been able to do if he had only had all these men free to work his will
upon Continental troops and win more triumphs like Austerlitz and Jena,
instead of being forced to send them battalion after battalion, and
army after army, to dash themselves to pieces against that unbreakable
phalanx of British valour and determination which the genius of
Wellington had drawn up across the Portuguese frontier.
Magnificent as were the efforts he made, and tremendous as were the
sacrifices which France submitted to for his sake, all the genius even
of Napoleon was of no avail as long as the life-blood of the Napoleonic
system was draining away through that open wound in the Peninsula. But
for this there would have been no Leipsic, and probably no Moscow, no
Waterloo, and no St. Helena.
The most splendid military triumph in the history of the world is the
uninterrupted march of victory made by Wellington and the soldiers
whom his genius had made unconquerable for more than a thousand miles
from the lines of Torres Vedras to the banks of the Seine. But behind
the brilliance of this incomparable triumph there is something better
still, something which Napoleon himself was first to see, and this was
the supreme genius which planned, and the untirable pertinacity which
carried out, without one hitch or fault from start to finish, that
marvellous series of operations which began with the first move of the
pawns at Rolica, and ended with the triumphant checkmate at Waterloo.
Although, as I say, it would be quite out of the question to attempt
to draw even the briefest outline of these magnificent campaigns,
yet there are one or two incidents in them which may be looked at in
passing for the sake of the glimpses they afford of the man in the
midst of his work, and, few though they may be, there is yet more real
knowledge to be got from them than from many pages of descriptions of
battles and sieges.
Thus, for instance, shortly after he landed for the second time in
Portugal there was a conspiracy among the French officers to depose
Marshal Soult, and one of these men came to Wellington across the
Douro to tell him of this so that he might make their work easier by
a crushing defeat. This might have been of enormous advantage to him,
but he refused point blank to avail himself of such base assistance,
and sent the traitor back to the master whom he had betrayed. He was
not the man to work by methods like this. He had his own methods, and
so effectual were they that ten days after he had landed at Lisbon
there was not a single French soldier on Portuguese soil who was not a
prisoner of war.
A month afterwards Napoleon writing to Soult and Ney said: “You are
to advance on the English, pursue them without cessation, beat them
and fling them into the sea. The English alone are redoubtable--they
alone. If the army is not differently managed, before the lapse of a
few months they will bring upon it a catastrophe.” How prophetic these
words were a glance at the splendidly inscribed colours of the British
Peninsular Regiments will amply suffice to show.
As usual, Wellington in the Peninsula, like Nelson in the
Mediterranean, was forced by the incompetence or imbecility of the
authorities at home to do his tremendous work with most inadequate
means. In Spain the people whom he had come to save refused his
soldiers food, and those at home, whom he was no less fighting to save,
refused him money enough to buy it. In a letter written in January,
1811, he put the position very plainly.
“If we cannot persevere in carrying on the contest in the Peninsula
or elsewhere on the Continent we must prepare to make one of our own
islands the seat of war. I am equally certain that if Buonaparte cannot
root us out of this country he must alter his system in Europe and give
us such a peace as we ought to accept.”
This was the work that he had to do and did, and here is a glimpse
of the means he had to do it with. “I have not,” he says in the same
letter, “authority to give a shilling or a stand of arms or a round of
ammunition to anybody. I do give all, it is true, but it is contrary to
my instructions and at my peril. Not another officer in the army would
even look at the risks that I have to incur every day.” There are not
many more eloquent pictures than this of a man serving his country and
saving it in spite of itself.
Like all good generals, Wellington insisted upon absolute obedience,
and nothing could excuse in his eyes even the most splendid breach of
discipline. After the taking of Ciudad Rodrigo, General Crawford, the
leader of the famous Light Division, had been ordered not to push his
operations beyond the river Coa, but he forgot his instructions in the
temptation to make a splendid dash at an overwhelming force under Ney.
Nothing but the magnificent valour and discipline of the Division saved
it from utter destruction. Still it was saved, and when its gallant
leader reported himself to Wellington he said: “I am glad to see you
safe, Crawford.”
“Oh, we were in no danger I can assure you!” was the answer.
“No, but I was through your conduct!” came the dry retort, and Crawford
walked away crestfallen, remarking to himself that the General was
“damned crusty to-day.”
Wellington’s best known title is the Iron Duke, and yet no man ever
had less iron in him than he. It is true that he armed himself from
head to foot with a mail which his enemies found impenetrable, but the
gallant heart whose high courage carried him through so many dangers
and difficulties was withal as tender as a woman’s.
When his last great fight had been fought and won, when the long
tragedy of the Napoleonic wars was over, and the curtain had just
fallen upon the tremendous climax of Waterloo, Dr. Hume, his physician,
went to see him early on the morning of the 19th of June to tell him
of the death during the night of his friend Gordon, and this is how he
described the conqueror on the morrow of his greatest victory.
“He had, as usual, taken off his clothes, but had not washed himself.
As I entered he sat up in bed, his face covered with the dust and
sweat of the previous day, and extended his hand to me which I took
and held in mine while I told him of Gordon’s death and of such of the
casualties as had come to my knowledge. He was much affected. I felt
the tears dropping fast upon my hand, and, looking towards him, saw
them chasing one another in furrows over his dusty cheeks.”
This is a touching little picture of the one man in the world who has
proved himself capable of grappling with and overthrowing the Corsican
Colossus, and with it we may here bid him farewell. Waterloo was the
last as well as the greatest of his fights. He had given the world
peace. He had overthrown the most grievous tyranny that had threatened
it for many a long century.
He had found Europe under the heel of France. He had conquered her
conqueror; and yet it was he who, when terms of peace were being
dictated in Paris, stopped his ferocious old ally Blücher from blowing
up the Bridge of Jena, and got such concessions for France in the hour
of her defeat and humiliation as none but the victor of the Peninsula
and the hero of Waterloo could have done. Like all really strong men,
he was merciful in his strength; and like all really great soldiers
he looked upon his enemies as his friends as soon as he had soundly
thrashed them.
With his after career as a politician and a statesman I have here
nothing to do. His empire-making ended with the order that sent the
whole steadfast British line streaming down from the rising ground
which they had held so stubbornly all through that famous day. It is
better to take leave of him here, for Arthur Wellesley was too good
and too great a man for politics. He was the idol of the army he had
created, but he didn’t know how to lead a mob.
[Illustration: THE ORDER THAT SENT THE BRITISH LINE STREAMING DOWN FROM
THE RISING GROUND.]
Seventeen years after Waterloo, to the very day, he was beset in London
streets by a howling multitude of the very people he had served so
splendidly.
If he had not found a refuge in the Temple and a bodyguard of Benchers,
it is probable that they would have pulled him from his horse and torn
him limb from limb. It is a sorry spectacle, although relieved by the
quaintness of the vision of this unconquered hero of a hundred fights
trusting for his life to a bodyguard of lawyers.
He never forgot this, and probably never forgave it. Every one knows
how, when Apsley House was threatened by a mob, he made ready to defend
it in a businesslike and soldierly way. When the mob broke his windows
he coolly ordered iron shutters and put them up. Afterwards, when the
fickle tide of popular fancy had turned the other way, and the mob
was wont to cheer instead of cursing him, he used to point to these
shutters and laugh good-humouredly but seriously withal.
In one sense, however, it is hardly true that Wellington’s last fight
was at Waterloo. The last time that he really made a display of his
military capacity was in London. It was he who on the 10th of April,
1848, saved London from the Chartists. He never allowed a soldier to be
seen, much less a weapon, and when it was all over, Sir John Campbell
came to him and said:
“Well, Duke, it all turned out as you foretold.”
And this was the answer:
“Oh, yes; I was sure of it, and I never showed a soldier or a musket,
but I was ready. I could have stopped them whenever you liked, and if
they had been armed it would have been all the same.”
That was Wellington’s last victory--bloodless, and, therefore, since
the enemy would have been his own countrymen, all the more glorious for
that.
In the article on Nelson, I mentioned the well-known fact that the
greatest soldier and the greatest sailor of their age met but once, and
that Wellington so far gauged the character of the hero of Trafalgar
as to describe him as “a very superior person.” In the spirit they not
only met again, but they will live together in everlasting honour in
the memory of the British people.
Their last resting-places are side by side, as they should be, in St.
Paul’s Cathedral, and side by side their glorious memories will remain
as long as the noble qualities which made them the greatest men, not
only of their nation, but of the age which their great deeds made
splendid, are held in honour--and that is the same thing as saying as
long as the human race endures.
XI
“_CHINESE GORDON_”
“_HONOUR--NOT HONOURS_”
XI
“CHINESE GORDON”
We are living rather too near to the days of the man himself, to be
able to say what place History will ultimately assign to the greatest
and most famous of the old fighting stock of the Gordons. Probably the
discriminating historian of the day after to-morrow will look upon him
ethnologically as a queer survival or throwback--a man who lived and
did his work in the nineteenth century in the style of the fifteenth,
or even the fourteenth.
In the military sense he would seem to be the last of our great
soldiers of fortune--for soldier of fortune he undoubtedly was far more
than soldier of Britain--and the work that he did as one of the makers
of the British Empire was done under foreign flags.
It might, indeed, be asked by the superficial observer in what sense
he was an Empire-Maker at all, or what right he has to claim a place
in that long and splendid array of great men, only a few of whom can
be silhouetted within the limits of such a volume as this and whose
succession stretches through the centuries from William, Duke of
Normandy to Cecil John Rhodes of Rhodesia.
The answer is plain enough, though not very obvious at first sight. The
British Empire is twofold. It is not only the greatest concrete Fact
that the world has ever seen; it is also a vast and very splendid Idea,
and in this sense it covers, not only just that portion of the earth’s
surface over which the Union Jack flies, but also every other land
known and half-known, old and new, civilised and savage, into which
the genius of the Anglo-Saxon has forced its way and over which it has
exercised that peculiar influence for which the word “English” stands
in the dictionaries of our foreign competitors.
Charles George Gordon never added a square yard to the British Empire,
considered as a geographical expression. He very seldom fought at
the head of British troops, and when he did, it was not to any very
great purpose--in fact his witnessing of the murder of many hundreds
of gallant British soldiers by the officials who were guilty of the
criminal mismanagement of the Crimean War was about the sum total of
his experiences of warfare under the Flag.
It is a not altogether curious fact that, although Gordon was one of
the very ablest leaders and organisers of men, and although he, shortly
after thirty, proved to demonstration that he possessed most of the
qualities of a great soldier, his native country didn’t appear to have
any use for him, or at least no adequate use. As I have said before,
the curse of both our Services, and therefore, in a very definite and
practical sense, of the whole Empire, is officialism, or officialdom.
Two very different men grasped this fact in its relation to Gordon. One
was Nubar Pasha, Egyptian Minister at Constantinople, and the other was
John Ruskin. Nubar said: “England owes little to her officials; she
owes her greatness to men of different stamp.” Ruskin said practically
the same thing in one of his lectures at Woolwich, but in different
fashion and in many more words, while Gordon, within a mile or so of
the lecture-hall at Woolwich, was bending his great soul to the routine
duties which appear to have been about the best work that the British
Government could find for him to do.
When the British Government did at last get him to take his share in
the doing of the most difficult and dangerous work which was just then
necessary to be done upon the very outskirts of civilisation, those
who were responsible for the exercise of the executive power deserted
him and left him to his death by what is probably the basest and most
criminal betrayal of a man of deeds by men of words that can be laid to
the charge of a British Government.
History will probably say with truth that every member of that fatally
futile Cabinet who had any hand in sending Gordon to Khartoum and
neglecting to give him reasonable support incurred a direct and
personal responsibility for his death, from which the dispassionate
verdict of Posterity will be very slow to relieve their memories.
It is a stain that can never pass away from their public reputations.
There are other faults of a similar sort for which these men will be
arraigned at the bar of History, but the fate of the lonely, betrayed
man, who day after day left his starving and ever-diminishing garrison
to look out across the desert from the battlements of Khartoum for
the help which, for him, never came, will certainly be considered the
blackest if not the greatest of them all.
But there is another and very practical sense in which Gordon was
a British Empire-Maker. This realm of ours is what it is, not only
because we have fought for some parts of it and successfully stolen
others. It is ours because we knew how to make use of it after we got
it; because of all other men now existing on the face of the earth the
Anglo-Saxon is the best leader and governor of savage and semi-savage
men that has so far been evolved, and of such leaders and governors
Gordon plainly proved himself to be one of the very best.
Under the British flag he never won a battle for Britain. The genius
which his Motherland might have made such splendid use of did its best
work under the dragon-flag of China and the crescent-flag of Egypt, but
nevertheless on the day when the last mile of the British high road
from Cairo to Cape Town is thrown open, and the _Pax Britannica_ is
proclaimed from north to south of Africa, men will remember Gordon and
confess that without him this might never have been done.
It will have been noticed by those who have read between the lines
here printed that where Empire-Makers are concerned the old-fashioned
idea of ancestry seems to be not altogether the fiction that certain
latter-day theorists, men of words to a man, have sought to make it,
and Gordon was no exception to this rule.
His lineage stretches away back into the dim mists which lie behind the
history of all these islands into the days when Englishmen, Scotsmen,
and Irishmen had yet to be thought of, and when the divisions of
mankind were racial rather than national.
Of course the Gordons of last century were for the most part desperate
Jacobites, and as such were hinderers rather than doers of the work
of empire-making. But, curiously enough, this particular Gordon did
not come from these. On the contrary, there was a fight during that
miserable business of 1745 in which, on the field of Gladsmuir,
a couple of thousand Highland clansmen played havoc with some
English regiments fresh back from the Flemish wars, and after the
slaughter they took many prisoners, one of whom was David Gordon,
great-grandfather of the hero and martyr of Khartoum.
From this it will be seen that, whether by design or accident, his
branch of the ancient and widespread stock had managed to get upon the
right side--that is to say, the side which was to fight for imperialism
as distinguished from mere nationalism, which in many cases is only
another way of spelling parochialism.
It is noteworthy, by the way, that Gordon’s grandfather, William
Augustus, so named after “Butcher Cumberland,” fought at Louisburg and
on the Heights of Abraham, after Captain Cook had taken those soundings
on the St. Lawrence. His son, William Henry, fought as an officer of
artillery at Maida, and it was his grandson who won the yellow jacket
and mandarin’s button in suppressing the Taiping rebellion, who refused
a roomful of gold as a bribe, and who, after carefully scratching out
the inscription, gave the huge gold medal which he had received from
the Emperor of China anonymously to the Coventry Relief Fund.
This “give away your medal,” to use his own words, is the keynote of
his whole life. Gordon worked “for honour, not honours,” and that one
letter makes a great deal of difference. We see here, too, the sign of
his kinship with other Empire-Makers, the faculty of seeing what work
had to be done and the power of doing it for its own sake, whatever
difficulties there might lie in the way.
As a boy he seemed to combine in the most curious fashion a
constitutional sensitiveness amounting almost to timidity, with a
contempt for personal danger, and an equal contempt for authority which
individually he was unable to respect.
Altogether, in fact, his was a nature which had very little to expect
in the way of promotion or favour from conventional officialdom, and
it was very little that he got. This view was no doubt amply justified
by his first experience in warfare in the trenches before Sebastopol,
for if ever heroism and devotion abroad were crucified by authority at
home, this was the case during the Crimean War.
From the Crimea the scene shifts somewhat suddenly to China. And yet
here we may note that this is not the place to stop and worry about the
morality or otherwise of those so-called opium wars which led up to the
trouble of 1860. If the opium trade was bad, the opening of the Flowery
Land to European commerce was good, and one usually does find good and
bad mixed up in the most extraordinary manner in matters of this sort.
The point here is that the brief war which ended with the taking of the
Taku forts in the August of 1860, and the capture of Pekin, was the
beginning of the career of “Chinese Gordon.”
He did not see the taking of the forts, but he did see the destruction
of the Summer Palace, “the Garden of Perpetual Brightness,” which was
destroyed as an act of revenge at the order of a British envoy who may
here be left nameless in the infamy that he earned by it. Gordon was
one of the involuntary Vandals, and this is what he said about the
business when writing home:
“You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the palaces
we burnt. It made one’s heart sore to destroy them. It was wretchedly
demoralising work.”
After this for a year and a half he fulfilled the duties of a Captain
of Engineers in the camp at Tien-Tsin in the midst of a vast dreary
plain. During this time the Taiping rebels had been industriously
employing fire and sword to make one of the most fertile portions of
the Flowery Land the reverse of worthy of the name and, at length
Shanghai itself, the headquarters of the foreign traders, was
threatened by the ever-advancing wave of barbarism.
A defensive force was hurriedly raised by an American named Ward, who
for nearly two years led it to constant victory and earned for it the
somewhat magniloquent title of the Ever-Victorious Army.
Then a chance bullet killed Ward at the beginning of what might have
been a most brilliant career. Under his successor everything went
wrong. Victory was replaced by defeat and success by disaster. This
incompetent person being removed, the hitherto obscure officer of
Engineers stepped into his place. It was a time when a leader of men
was badly wanted. It was also the moment when Fate knocked at the door
of Charles George Gordon and found him in.
Within a very short time disorganisation was replaced by discipline,
despair by confidence, and the Ever-Victorious Army was once more made
worthy of its name. It was here that Gordon really began his career
as a soldier of fortune. When he took command he told Li-Hung-Chang
that he would turn the rebels out of the score of walled cities which
they had captured and strengthened, and put the rebellion down within
eighteen months. As a matter of fact he did it in fifteen.
The story of the doing of this so clearly shows the extraordinary
capacity that Gordon possessed for both the organisation and the
execution of a military campaign, as well as the faculty of inspiring
confidence in all sorts and conditions of men, that it is simply
amazing that the home authorities did not immediately recognise the
fact that he was something a good deal more than they had hitherto
taken him for. This, however, it was to take them some twenty years
more to find out.
Still there was one incident at the close of the rebellion which
might have shown even the official mind very clearly what sort of
man this Major of Engineers was. The last incident of the war was
the surrender of the great lake-city of Soo-Chow, and the Wangs, or
chiefs of the rebels, laid down their arms on a guarantee of safety and
good treatment. The Chinese way of acting up to this was to chop the
heads off the whole lot. Now Gordon considered himself in a measure
responsible for this guarantee, and the way in which he marked his
sense of the breach of faith was characteristically unique.
The brilliancy of his services was recognised by a money gift of 10,000
taels (between three and four thousand pounds of English money).
Gordon acknowledged it by writing on the back of the Imperial letter:
“Major Gordon regrets that, owing to the circumstances which occurred
since the capture of Soo-Chow, he is unable to receive any mark of his
Majesty the Emperor’s recognition.”
If ever a sceptred monarch got the snub direct the Son of Heaven must
have got it then, although the probability is that the 10,000 taels
never found their way back to the Imperial treasury. Gordon also wanted
to throw up the whole business, but the rebellion suddenly broke out
again in another place, and so he went on with his work until it was
finally crushed, for he was not the sort of man who liked to begin a
thing and not get through with it.
His brilliant success in every single operation that he conducted
clearly proved, as I have said, that in Gordon Britain possessed a true
leader of men and master of affairs; in other words an Empire-Maker of
the first order. And yet she first ignored and undervalued him, and
then, as David did with Uriah, put him in the forefront of the battle
and left him there to die.
For twenty years after we had wars in many places--in South and West
Africa, in Egypt, Abyssinia, and Afghanistan. In some we gained credit
and in some disgrace, but during all that twenty years the leaden eye
of officialdom never seems to have fallen upon Gordon. The Chinamen
were quicker sighted. He was the first and I believe the only “foreign
devil” who was endowed with the Yellow Jacket and made one of the
bodyguard of the Son of Heaven.
If he had chosen he might have made an enormous fortune and risen to
any dignity short of the throne that the Flowery Land had to offer,
but as a matter of fact he left China poorer than he went into it,
bringing away with him only that big gold medal which he afterwards
gave anonymously to charity.
And all this time he was, as one of his biographers and a fellow
soldier has truly said, “not only without honour in his own country,
but was regarded by many of the mandarins and ruling classes of his
fellow countymen as a madman.” The use of the word “mandarin” there
will be understood if we remember that his brother mandarins of China
held him in the highest honour.
He came back to England in 1865, and was given the command of the Royal
Engineers at Gravesend, and there for six years he did the routine work
of a soldier, and in his spare time won a reputation for missionary
work of the unofficial and unassuming sort which will live as long as
his fame as a soldier and leader of men.
Here in the interval between his two careers we may take a glance at
the physical man as he was just about now. This is how his comrade Sir
William Butler describes him: “In figure Gordon, at forty years of
age, stood somewhat under middle height, slight but strong, active,
and muscular. A profusion of thick, brown hair clustered above a
broad, open forehead. His features were regular, his mouth firm, and
his expression when silent had a certain undertone of sadness which
instantly vanished when he spoke.
“But it was the clear, grey-blue eyes, and the low, soft, and very
distinct voice that left the most lasting impression on the memory of
the man who had seen and spoken with Charles Gordon, and an eye that
seemed to have looked at great distances and seen the load of life
carried on men’s shoulders, and a voice that, like the clear chime of
some Flemish belfry, had in it fresh music to welcome the newest hour,
even though it had rung out the note of many a vanished day.”
Such was, then, the outer aspect of the man who at length went to Egypt
at the invitation of Nubar Pasha and the Khedive Ismael, to begin that
work which in the end cost one of the most valuable of British lives,
and made the delta and valley of the Nile what they are to-day in
everything but name--a British province.
In this sense Gordon was _de facto_ an Empire-Maker. The mendacious
amenities of Diplomacy may lisp out meaningless phrases about the
evacuation of Egypt, but the fact is that we have re-created the land
of the Pharaohs, we have brought it from bankruptcy to prosperity, we
have released the fellah from the terror of the lash and the servitude
of forced labour. We have raised a downtrodden peasantry to the
position of self-respecting citizens, and we have turned slaves into
soldiers. This was the work that Gordon began for us, although we did
not employ him to do it, or recognise that he was doing it; but, having
taken it over and carried it so far, it is hardly likely that even
British officialdom will commit such a crime against civilisation as
the surrender of the almost completed task would now be.
Gordon went south from Cairo by way of Suakin and Berber to Khartoum,
taking with him the somewhat curious title of Governor of the
Equator--which of course meant the Equatorial Provinces--and a very
distinct conception of a Central African Dominion which the soldiers
and statesmen of other generations will realise in due course,
provided always that the onward march of the Anglo-Saxon is not turned
aside or stopped by faint-heartedness within or disaster without.
His headquarters or capital was a place called Gondokoro, situate in
the midst of a ghastly region of river, lake, and swamp, sunbaked by
day, and miasma-haunted by night. He went up by steamer from Khartoum
and, some two hundred miles above the city, he passed the island of
Abba in the White Nile, and in one of his letters home he wrote these
words which read somewhat weirdly in the lurid light of the camp-fires
which seven years later closed round Khartoum:
“Last night, March 26th, we were going slowly along in the moonlight
and I was thinking of you all and of the expeditions and Nubar and Co.,
when all of a sudden from a large bush came peals of laughter. I felt
put out, but it turned out to be birds, who laughed at us from the
bushes for some time in a very rude way. They are a species of stork,
and seemed in capital spirits and highly amused at anybody thinking of
going to Gondokoro with the hope of doing anything.”
But the laughing storks were not the only inhabitants of the Island
of Abba, for, in a cave among its rocks, there was dwelling at that
very moment a certain Moslem monk, or dervish, named Mohammed Achmet,
who had already won some reputation for sanctity among his fellow
tribesmen.
It would have been a most unwarrantable and, for Gordon, quite an
impossible thing to do, and yet, so far is fact stranger than fiction,
that the whole history of about a quarter of a continent would have
been changed for the better, and the march of civilisation and humanity
in Northern Africa would have been incalculably accelerated if the
Governor-General of the Equator had stopped his boat just at that
point, landed his men on the island, routed the holy man out of his
cave, and either put a bullet through his head or drowned him in the
Nile; for this recluse, then unknown beyond the confines of his native
desert, was destined seven years later to be hailed by the Soudan
tribesmen as the Mahdi--a word which to us means so much disgrace and
disaster as well as hard and tardily won triumph that there is no need
here to further elaborate the coincidence.
It was not a pleasant land, this scene of Gordon’s first government.
As he himself says of the wilderness: “No one can conceive the utter
misery of these lands. Heat and mosquitoes day and night all the
year round.” These are few words, but I am able to say from personal
experience that to those who know what African heat and African
mosquitoes _are_ they speak very eloquently.
Here, until October, 1876, Gordon lived and worked and suffered, making
maps, building forts, enticing traders to come to him, teaching his
soldiers to work and to till the ground and raise crops instead of
plundering the natives. One by one his staff died about him, but still
somehow the work went on.
When he first arrived he wrote: “the only possessions Egypt has in my
province are two forts, one here at Gondokoro and the other at Fatiko.
There are three hundred men in one and two hundred in the other. You
can’t go out in safety half a mile.”
But towards the end of ’76 the line of posts had been pushed to Duffli,
a place on the Nile only three degrees north of the Equator itself.
Lake Albert Nyanza had been circumnavigated for the first time by a
steamboat and mapped out--not by Gordon himself, who declined the
honour of first steaming on its waters, but by an Italian lieutenant
of his, named Gessi, and his reason for doing this was “to give a
practical proof of what I think regarding the inordinate praise which
is given to an explorer.”
His idea was that those who did the hard work, the getting up of
stores and boats and other impedimenta over rapids and across deserts,
were the real men who deserved the honour. “But all this would go for
nothing in comparison with the fact of going on the lake, which you
may say is a small affair when you have the boats ready for you”--from
which certain much-boomed and belauded explorers known to latter-day
fame might well learn wisdom as well as a little becoming modesty.
The farther south the bounds of Equatoria were pushed the more dismal
the country seems to have become. He calls it “a dead, mournful spot,
with a heavy, damp dew penetrating everywhere. It is as if the angel
Azrael had spread his wings over this land. You have little idea of the
silence and solitude. I am sure no one whom God did not support could
bear up. It is simply killing.”
At length the three years of his miserable service came to an end. In
October he set his face northward from Khartoum and ate his Christmas
dinner in London.
It was in those days that Britain woke up to some sense of her
opportunities and responsibilities. She had begun what was then called
the “forward” policy, and which to-day with wider vision and sounder
wisdom we call the Imperial policy.
Unhappily the fickle breath of popular favour soon blew the other way
for a space; a halt was called, then a retreat was sounded, and of
course with the inevitable result. The arms of Britain were sullied
by defeat, and her ancient honour was stained by the breach of her
plighted word and the desertion of those who had trusted to her faith.
This was the dark and disgraceful period which lasted from the end
of 1880 to the beginning of 1885. It began with the desertion of the
heroic British garrisons in the Transvaal and the everlasting shame
of Majuba Hill, and it ended with the political betrayal and the
constructive murder of Charles George Gordon.
It was on January 31, 1877, that Gordon went back to Africa as
Governor-General of the Soudan. On May 5th he was installed at
Khartoum; on the 19th he left to strike his first blow against slavery;
by June 7th he had crossed four hundred miles of wilderness and passed
the frontier of Dafour.
His movements during this time, amazing as they are now to us, were
absolutely paralysing to the chiefs and officials of the country. To
them a Pasha of Egypt was a portly gentleman, never in a hurry, never
inclined to leniency or mercy, a staunch upholder of the slave trade in
its worst as well as its best aspects, and possessing a very keen eye
indeed to the main chance.
But the quite phenomenal Pasha who now flits across their astonished
vision is a lean, yellow-faced little man, clad in the gorgeous but
dusty and travel-stained uniform of a Marshal of Turkey, mounted on a
swift dromedary which out-distances every other animal of the desert
save the beast ridden by the Arab sheikh who accompanies him. The two
fly from point to point with incredible rapidity; the words of the
Pasha are sometimes stern and sometimes mild, but always just and
always dead against slavery. There is no talk of what he wants for
himself, but only of what he wants done or left undone, because this or
that is right or wrong--and what he wants he gets.
The troops that came labouring after him were of such miserable
material that they deserved only to be made slaves themselves, and such
the Arabs would speedily have made them but for this yellow-faced,
bright-eyed man, who set them one against another, played off their
jealousies and hatreds, and generally out-manœuvred them with such
consummate and incomprehensible skill, striking at such vast distances
with such incredible rapidity, that in four months a seemingly
impossible feat had been accomplished, and the rebellion of the
slave-kings put down.
And yet it was all hopeless. The slave trade was too much for him, as
it has so far been too much for every one else. “I declare I see no
human way to stop it!” he writes in one of his letters. “When you have
got the ink that has soaked into blotting-paper out of it, then slavery
will cease in these lands.”
In the November of 1877 there occurred an incident which was destined
in after years to bear terrible fruit. He travelled from Kordofan
_viâ_ Khartoum to Merawy. He was on his way to Wadi Halfa to see about
pushing on the railway from there to Dongola. But before he got there
a dispatch reached him saying that the Abyssinians had invaded the
Eastern Soudan. Back he went, post-haste, only to find the news was
false.
If it had not been for this the railway would have been completed, and
the cataracts of the Nile would not have delayed the tardily-sent
Relief Expedition until the Arab bullets had done their work and
gallant Gordon’s busy head had rolled to the foot of the Mahdi’s throne.
A few weeks after this he is once more in Cairo in obedience to an
urgent summons from the Khedive. The work was this time financial. The
grip of the foreign bondholder was closing round the throat of the
fellaheen, and the bill for official extravagance and incompetence had
to be paid. It was characteristic of Gordon that his first financial
reform was the cutting down of his own salary from six thousand to
three thousand a year.
This was all very well, but when he proposed to apply the same methods
to other people’s salaries he was very soon given to understand that
he was not the kind of man who was wanted in Cairo just then, so he
promptly threw up his presidency of the Committee of Inquiry and
went back to two years’ more work in the Soudan, to fight the slave
trade again in the old heroic, hopeless fashion, and to make maps and
plans; to fly hither and thither over the ghastly, waterless country,
sometimes riding for as much as two months at a time, till at last the
replacement of his old friend Ismael by Tewfik Pasha once more called
him back to Cairo.
This time he went to Abyssinia also, and got arrested twice, a
circumstance which enabled him to give us the following word picture of
King Johannes. “He is of the strictest sect of the Pharisees. He talks
like the Old Testament. Drunk overnight, he is up at dawn reading the
psalms. If he were in England he would never miss a prayer-meeting, and
would have a Bible as big as a portmanteau.”
After his release he came home again to rest, as he thought, but as a
fact to be called after a few weeks’ run on the Continent to take the
command of the Colonial Forces at the Cape of Good Hope.
It was the eve of the Transvaal War, and now Gordon made the first and
the greatest mistake of his life. He refused the command. If he had
taken it there might have been no Transvaal War; certainly there would
have been no Ingogo or Majuba Hill. He started instead to India to be
Secretary to Lord Ripon, the new Liberal Viceroy.
Three days after he landed he threw up his appointment, and two days
later he received an urgent invitation from China. He asked for leave,
and the War Office refused. He threw up his commission, making a
present of its value, about £6,000, to his stupid and graceless masters.
He stopped the war with Russia, and sped back again to London,
receiving a telegram on the way telling him that his leave had been
cancelled and his resignation refused.
He afterwards made a futile visit to Ireland and an equally futile
trip to South Africa. He offered to go and help in settling the Basuto
trouble. The Cape Government, to its loss and its shame, had not even
the politeness to reply to his offer, but when two millions of money
and a great number of valuable lives had been lost, they asked him a
year later if he would renew his offer, and, like the generous and
single-hearted hero that he was, he did so.
Unhappily, however, when he got on the scene of action he spoilt
everything by allowing the enthusiast in him to get the better of
the soldier and the skilled man of affairs. The Cape Government was
certainly in the wrong as regards the Basuto question. Gordon’s advice
to them was to admit their wrong and begin to do right. Very good
indeed from the ethical point of view, but in practice hopelessly wrong
and bad where the South African native is concerned. With him, as with
the Boers, to admit yourself in the wrong is to own yourself defeated,
and to invite instant aggression.
Of course the Cape Government could do nothing of the sort. To have
done so would have been to have kindled the flames of native war over
the whole southern half of the Continent. This was the fatal policy
which had already lost us the Transvaal when Sir Evelyn Wood had it in
the hollow of his hand. To have repeated it would probably have been
to lose all South Africa. Gordon, in his usual fashion, threw up his
appointment at once and came back to England.
It was now November, 1882. Naturally he was coldly received at home,
but his reception was somewhat mollified by a letter which the King
of the Belgians sent him, for the second time asking him to enter his
service.
“For the moment,” says his Majesty, “I have no mission to offer you,
but I wish to have you at my disposal, and I wish to take you from this
moment as my counsellor. You can name your own terms. You know the
consideration I have for your great qualities.”
The post that he would probably have had was the Governorship of the
Congo. One can imagine how in such a position he would have dealt with
an unhung blackguard like Lothaire, the murderer of a man who had
confided himself to his hospitality.
He spent most of the following year in travel, chiefly in Palestine.
The Delta of Egypt had been conquered, Mohammed Achmet, the carpenter’s
son, had become Mahdi, and the Soudan revolt was in full blast. Now at
last the British Government called upon the one man who, had his genius
and his work been recognised ten years sooner, could have saved so much
disgrace and disaster.
How utterly he had been neglected and how completely he was unknown
in his own country even now, may be guessed from a remark made by a
gentleman to an officer of the Pembroke garrison.
“I see,” said this person, “that the Government have just sent a
Chinaman to the Soudan. What can they mean by sending a native of that
country to such a place?”
He thought, alas, that “Chinese Gordon” was a yellow-faced Asiatic who
wore a pigtail--and yet, after all, did British Officialdom know very
much more about the hero it was now sending to his death?
In Egypt all was panic. The army of Hicks Pasha had been annihilated.
All Gordon’s work was undone, and the Mahdi was practically master of
the Soudan. But meanwhile Gordon had decided to accept the King of
the Belgians’ offer. On New Year’s Day, 1884, he reached Brussels to
tell him so, and the same day he learnt that the British Government
would not let him go. His thoroughly justified answer was a request to
be allowed to retire from Her Majesty’s service, “without any claim
whatever for pension”--King Leopold, with a juster estimate of the
man’s value, having promised to make up the loss to him. The refusal
was withdrawn, and he prepared to start for the Congo.
Then on the 17th of January there came that memorable telegram from
Lord Wolseley asking him to come to London. He knew what he was wanted
for and he went. The work was the pacification and then the evacuation
of the Soudan.
By the 18th of February he was in Khartoum again. His old influence
at once reasserted itself. What followed is too recent and too
well known for detailed repetition here: the vacillation between war
and peace, between diplomacy and force, argument when there should
have been hard-hitting, and hard-hitting when there should have been
argument.
[Illustration: THE LONELY MAN WHO STOOD ON THE RAMPARTS OF KHARTOUM.]
The net result was only fully known to the lonely man who month after
month stood on the ramparts of Khartoum, beleaguered by the Mahdi’s
innumerable hosts, looking out over the desert and down the Nile for
the army of relief which ought even then to have been there, and which
was waiting for politicians to finish their wrangles before it even
started.
Then, week after week, the weary working and waiting went on, the ring
of spears drawing ever closer and closer round the doomed city, the
provisions within rapidly dwindling, and the lonely soldier, the last
of his blood now left in Khartoum, was still looking vainly northward.
So Monday morning, the 26th of January, came, and in the dim light
that comes before the dawn the Arabs made their last and successful
assault. The moon had set at one o’clock. The famished garrison made
but little resistance. Gordon at the head of about a score of men faced
the incoming victors near the church of the Austrian mission.
The eastern sky was just reddening with the coming dawn when a stream
of Arabs, shouting for Islam and victory, rushed into the open space
that had been made round the church. They stopped and put up their
rifles. An irregular volley crackled along their line, and when the
smoke had drifted away there was nothing for the belated expedition to
do but avenge the death of the betrayed and deserted hero.
It was about midday on the 28th when a couple of steamers, with Sir
Charles Wilson and a detachment of the Sussex Regiment on board,
steamed out on to the broad stretch of river above which Khartoum
stands at the junction of the Blue and White Nile. Half-an-hour told
the miserable truth. There was no flag flying from the battlements, and
no English voice to bid the tardy comers welcome.
But there is to be a welcome of a sort, for, as the boats come within
range, the guns of Khartoum open fire on them and a spattering hail of
rifle-balls drop about them, and the puffs of smoke leap up from every
point along the banks till the circle round the boats is completed. Of
this there could be only one meaning: Gordon the deserted was dead.
And this meaning was true, though we did not know the full truth of it
until long after all that was left of him on earth had been scattered,
graveless and uncared for, over the wind-swept sands of the Soudan.
There is his grave; there, too, now is his monument--the memory of the
work he did and the deathless fame he earned. On those who sent him
to the forefront of the battle and left him there to die History has
not yet given her verdict. When she does it will, as usual, be a just
one, and, in all probability, it will not form very pleasant reading
for those of their descendants who may be animated with anything like a
proper pride of ancestry.
XII
_CECIL RHODES_
“_ALL ENGLISH--THAT’S MY DREAM!_”
XII
CECIL RHODES
Although there are obvious difficulties in the way of writing at once
without fear and without favour of a man who is unquestionably one of
the great ones of the earth while he is still alive, there are yet two
very cogent reasons why Cecil Rhodes should be the subject of this
concluding essay.
In the first place, he is the last of our Empire-Makers in order of
time, and, in the second place, he has done his empire-making in the
last region of the earth in which this empire, or any other, can be
extended without coming into direct armed conflict with the great
Powers of the earth.
If you get a map of Africa published thirty years ago, and lay it
beside a quite recent one, a very little intelligent observation
will enable you to see, at any rate, what I may be allowed to call
_prima facie_ evidence of the magnificent work which this last of our
Empire-Makers has done, not so much for this generation, perhaps, as
for the next, and the next.
It is all very well for the goose that has never seen over its own
farmyard wall to assume a lofty, and possibly sincere, contempt for the
vast stretches of prairie and forest land that may lie outside. He is
quite justified in saying to his brother geese: “This is our home; all
our wants are supplied here. What do we want to go and lose ourselves
for in the long grass, or expose ourselves to the wild animals that
may be lurking about the dark depths of the forest? This farmyard
where we have lived all our lives, and where our long and honourable
ancestry has lived before us, is surely enough for us. There is a
nice pond yonder fringed with succulent mud. It has nice worms and
other things in it, and there doesn’t seem any prospect of our general
supply of goose-food coming to an end. What do we care about what there
is outside? Why should we trouble ourselves about the fortunes of
silly birds who go and fly over the wall, and lose themselves in the
wilderness? Let them go. What are they to us, even if they were born in
the same farmyard?”
That is all very well as far as it goes, but there comes a time when
the farmyard fills up, and the duck-pond becomes over-crowded, and
worms and goose-food, &c., have to be scrambled for, and sometimes even
fought for, and it is just here that the larger wisdom of those who not
only look over, but fly over, the farmyard wall comes in.
The fact is, that the known world is fast filling up. It may be that
Nature is preparing some colossal cataclysm for the destruction of this
civilisation, just as she has done for the subversion of others; but,
for the present, what those who have looked over the farmyard wall
have to consider is the fact that vastly improved conditions of life
in the older countries of the world have, with the sole and ominous
exception of France, had their inevitable result in a vast increase of
population, and that meanwhile, for the last three hundred years or so,
the available portions of the world have been getting discovered, and
filled up according to their capacity of sustenance.
It is not, therefore, a merely predatory instinct, or a felonious
desire to go and steal away from the gentle savage those lands which he
is mostly accustomed to use as battlefields, that sends out the pioneer
to the uttermost ends of the earth. It is that ineradicable instinct
planted deep in all healthy human nature to get elbow-room, and behind
this instinct there is the necessity which Providence provided against
when it gave us this instinct, and that is the necessity of getting
out of a place that is overcrowded, into some other where muscles and
brains can get a better chance.
It is probable, too, that that widespread passion which we are
accustomed to call “land-hunger” has been given to us in order to
compel us to carry out the vast scheme of human progress under the
impression that we are benefiting ourselves.
Of course, as a rule, we do benefit ourselves, but it is reserved for
the few to see that greater Purpose which we are fulfilling at the
same time that we are serving ourselves, and of all the men who ever
lived no one has seen this more clearly than Cecil Rhodes. Accident and
weak lungs took him to Africa--that is to say to the only continent in
which it is yet possible for the British Empire to be increased without
violating the territory of some already established and recognised
Power, more or less civilised.
Like Nelson and Warren Hastings, he came of a clerical stock. If it had
not been for those weak lungs of his it is possible that he might have
passed through a distinguished career at Oxford, and either entered the
church, or gone into business--probably the latter--but in either case
the map of South Africa would have looked very different to what it
does to-day.
In one respect he presents a very strong and striking contrast to
our other Empire-Makers. Francis Drake went on his filibustering
expeditions, looted plate-ships, and sacked towns, no doubt with a
worthy intention of hurting the Queen’s enemies, but also with a very
definite idea of making money. John Hawkins started the Slave Trade for
the same reason; so too that East India Company which made it possible
for Clive and Warren Hastings to do their work, was in its beginnings
a money-making concern, and little else. It will be remembered,
for instance, how Warren Hastings was grievously hampered in his
empire-making by the incessant demands of his directors for money.
Now the distinctive fact of Cecil Rhodes’s career is that he started
the other way. The first solid and salient fact that he appears to have
grasped in those old days in the early seventies, when he used to sit
under the burning African sun at a rough deal table picking diamonds
out from the yellow earth as it was brought by his kaffirs from the old
Kimberley mine, was the transcendent and almost irresistible power of
money.
In Drake’s day valour and endurance were used to earn money in the
first case, or, if the reader prefers it, to steal money or its
equivalent. This was well enough in its way, and the British Empire
would have got on rather badly without it, but Cecil Rhodes appears to
have had an inspiration on this subject of the sort which only comes
to men of real genius. He seems to have said to himself: “How would it
be to earn the money first in thousands, in hundreds of thousands, in
millions if possible, and then use it to employ in more legitimate work
the same valour and enthusiasm which are just as conspicuous British
qualities now as they were in the days of Queen Elizabeth?”
It is quite possible that, being an Oxford undergraduate, he remembered
the famous aphorism of Horace: “Honestly if possible--but still make
it.” There may have been some of his transactions which if submitted
to the legal scrutiny, say, of the Lord Chief Justice, would possibly
move him to another exhibition of that “unctuous rectitude” such as
that with which he, the sometime forensic defender of traitors and
sedition-mongers, outpoured on Dr. Jameson and his comrades.
I have heard stories of the sort myself in Kimberley and elsewhere in
South Africa, but what of that? There are a good many things in our
history that it would be difficult to defend on moral grounds, and yet
without them we should have little or no history at all.
There are several of Cecil Rhodes’s own sayings on record which show
clearly the light in which he looked upon large quantities of money not
merely as money, not as vulgar riches, but as an indispensable means to
an exalted end.
He was with Gordon in that sadly futile expedition of his to
Basutoland, and during one of their conversations Gordon told him how
he had been offered a roomful of gold as a reward for his services in
China.
“And you mean to say you didn’t take it?” said Rhodes, possibly with
some doubt of the great Crusader’s sanity in his mind.
“No, I didn’t,” said Gordon. “I didn’t feel altogether justified in
doing so. I had been paid already for what I’d done.”
“I should have taken it, and as many more roomfuls as they would have
given me,” said Rhodes, without hesitation. “Just think how much more
you could have done with it. It’s no use for us to have big ideas if we
have not got the money to carry them out.”
That was Cecil Rhodes. He didn’t say: “Think how much it would have
come to,” or “How rich a man it would have made you,” or even “What you
would have been able to buy with it,” but “What you could _do_ with
it.” Those who call Cecil Rhodes a money-grabber, a financial schemer,
and all the rest of it, might learn something from that conversation
were they not as they are.
There is no doubt but that he first of all devoted himself body and
soul to the making of money, and yet in the meanwhile he must have been
slowly shaping this Ideal of his. Early in the eighties he was talking
about South Africa generally with a friend, and during the course of
the conversation he pointed to the map and said: “There! All English!
That’s my dream.” And all English it would have been if it had not been
for the stupidity, the ignorance, and the cowardice of the vote-hunters
in Downing Street, who were afraid to be worried with the cares, though
they had no objection to avail themselves of the honours and profits of
empire-making.
It is a favourite theory of my own that no man ought to be allowed to
sit either in the House of Lords or the House of Commons unless he has
been at least once round the world and visited the greater part of the
British Empire.
If this had been the rule during the present reign, I am perfectly
certain that, whether by purchase, conquest, or colonisation, the whole
of Africa from the Zambesi to the Cape would now be coloured red, and
there would probably have been a red streak stretching from Cairo _viâ_
Khartoum to the shores of Lake Tanganyka.
In one of his speeches, Cecil Rhodes aptly described South Africa as
the Cinderella of the British Colonies, and this is perfectly true.
There is hardly a single instance in which Downing Street has not tried
to lose what every one now recognises as of almost priceless importance.
Thus, for instance, in 1872 Lord Kimberley might have bought Delagoa
Bay, “the keyhole of Africa,” for the paltry amount of twelve or
fifteen thousand pounds and he refused the bargain. It would be cheap
now at ten millions. Unfortunately, as his biographer aptly puts it,
there was no Cecil Rhodes then to find the money out of his own pocket.
He was still sitting on a bucket and sorting diamonds in Kimberley.
Again, in 1875, the Cape Colonial Government strongly urged the
annexation of Walfisch Bay and Damaraland on the south-west coast. The
reply of Downing Street was: “Her Majesty can give no encouragement
to schemes for the retention of British jurisdiction over Great
Namaqualand and Damaraland.”
This, by the way, is a somewhat important point to those who wish to
get a clear view of Cecil Rhodes’s work as an Empire-Maker in South
Africa. Twenty-two years ago Ernst von Weber, who had been prospecting,
as it were, for a German South African Empire, said: “What would not
such a country full of such inexhaustible natural treasures become if
in course of time it is filled with German emigrants! Besides all its
own natural and subterraneous treasures, the Transvaal offers to the
European Power which possesses it an easy access to the immensely rich
tracts of country which lie between the Limpopo and the Central African
lakes and the Congo.”
In 1884 Prince Bismarck said before a committee of the Reichstag:
“No opposition is apprehended from the British Government, and the
machinations of the Colonial authorities must be prevented.”
Now look at any modern map of South Africa. Damaraland is now German
territory, the Transvaal has been given back to the corrupt and
tyrannical government which has of late made itself a libel on the
name of civilisation. A German railway runs from Pretoria to Delagoa
Bay, the only road from the sea to the Transvaal which does not pass
through British territory. There is a regular line of German steamers
to Delagoa Bay, and through this channel have come in the German
officers who have drilled the Transvaal army and built the forts which
command Johannesburg and Pretoria, as well as the field-pieces and
machine-guns, the thousands of rifles and the millions of cartridges,
which have no other purpose than the oppression of British subjects and
the slaughter of British soldiers as soon as the psychological moment
arrives.
This much for the present has been lost, and unhappily no one has been
hung for the losing of it. Some day it will have to be taken back,
probably at a frightful loss of life and an enormous expenditure of
money.
But there is one bright spot in the picture. Between the German
territory of Damaraland and the western frontier of the Transvaal and
the Free State there is a broad stretch of red. It was only painted red
just in the nick of time, and it was Cecil Rhodes who painted it.
Another glance at the map will convince you in a moment what would have
happened if he had not made Bechuanaland British. To the east there is
the ignorantly hostile Transvaal. Behind that and stretching far away
to the northward is the Portuguese territory of Mozambique. Farther
north are the southern confines of the Soudan, and the enormous virgin
lands of Central Africa. To the west is German West Africa. Hence,
but for that red strip, there would be no way either by sea or land
through British territory--that is to say, through no territory that
would not be hostile--to the Central African Empire of the future, most
of which is, thanks to Cecil Rhodes, already called Rhodesia.
People who only read the English papers, some of which would appear,
like the Pretoria _Press_ and the _Standard and Diggers News_, to be in
the pay of Mr. President Krüger and his corrupt legislature, have an
idea, and a very natural one too, that the great company known as the
De Beers Consolidated Mines is just a money-making concern and nothing
else. There never was a greater mistake. The De Beers Company is the
creation of Cecil Rhodes, and therefore it had to be an empire-making
concern one way or the other.
One night there was a conversation between three men in Kimberley,
which deserves to become historical. The three men were Alfred Beit,
Barnie Isaacs Barnato, and Cecil John Rhodes. Each of these three men
had something that the others wanted. Beit and Barnato don’t seem to
have wanted much more than good business, but Alfred Beit already
knew Cecil Rhodes for something much greater and better than merely a
business man and piler-up of money-bags, so he supported them.
What Rhodes wanted was nothing less than the levying of a subsidy
on the diamond mining industry of Kimberley, for the purpose of
empire-making in the north. Barnie Barnato kicked at this. In the end
he gave way, as he always did to Rhodes, and the result was that the De
Beers Corporation was virtually taxed to the extent of half a million
sterling for that northward expansion which Cecil Rhodes made possible
when he persuaded Sir Hercules Robinson to proclaim the Bechuanaland
Protectorate and checkmated the Germans on the west and the Boers on
the east just as they were going to join hands across it.
What they really meant to do may be easily inferred from Van Niekerk’s
raid into the so-called Stella-Land which necessitated Sir Charles
Warren’s expedition--for which the Pretorian Government still owes
us about a million and a half--and Colonel Ferreira’s attempted raid
across the Limpopo into Matabeleland which was only stopped by Dr.
Jameson’s Maxims.
If it had not been for Cecil Rhodes and the De Beers half million, the
British flag would not now be flying over a region as large as France
and Germany combined which, by all appearances, is destined to be the
nucleus of the South African Empire of the day after to-morrow.
In such a vast country as South Africa--how big it is may be guessed
from the comparison between it and England on the map--the first
requisite for advancing civilisation is a road, the next a telegraph,
and the next is a railway, and the absolute necessity of these to
the new domain that he was making for Britain was of course plainly
apparent to such a man as Cecil Rhodes.
His dream, which, if he lives long enough, he will certainly realise,
is the making of that British high road from Cairo to Cape Town
which Gordon, but for the baseness which betrayed him to his death,
would certainly now be helping to make from the other end. Therefore
when there was a shortness of money for the making of the railway
to Mafeking, and for carrying the telegraph up through Rhodesia and
northward across the Zambesi, the deficiency was supplied out of the
capacious pockets of the man who, if he had only had the chance, would
have been so glad to give that £12,000 for Delagoa Bay, and who knows
Africa well enough to see that with its rinderpest, its locusts, and
its horse-sickness, it stands in more need of mechanical transit and
communication than any other part of the world.
When the extension of the Beira railway became necessary Cecil Rhodes,
by the sheer force of his own character, persuaded Lord Rothschild to
put down £25,000, every penny of which the great financier believed
was going to be “chucked into the sea.” His Lordship probably thinks
differently now.
Perhaps the most salient feature in the contemporary history of South
Africa is the silent but ceaseless struggle for mastery which is going
on, and has been going on for years, between Cecil Rhodes and Paul
Krüger.
There are some people who say that there are only two men in South
Africa. In the political sense this is probably true. So far, with the
single exception, perhaps, of the Jameson Raid and the consequences
which the weakness of our officials abroad and the cowardice of our
government at home made so deplorable, the enlightened Englishman has
scored at every move over the dishonest cunning of the ignorant Dopper.
He prevented him joining hands with the Germans across Bechuanaland,
he stopped his raid into Matabeleland, he got his raiders stopped on
the confines of Amatongaland--and so destroyed his cherished dream of a
Transvaal seaboard--and, worse than all, he has made Rhodesia a so much
better place even for Dutchmen to live in than the Transvaal, that the
Boers are every day treking through the drifts of the Limpopo to live
on British soil and under British rule--that of Paul Krüger and his
German and Hollander hangers-on becoming impossible for self-respecting
men to submit to just as fast as their avarice and stupidity can make
it so.
Both these men have their dreams. Paul Krüger is not the sort of person
whom any one would associate with an ideal. Still he has got one. It is
a United States of South Africa, under what he is pleased to consider
republican rule.
He is probably too ignorant to know that, with the possible exceptions
of Russia and Turkey, there never was a civilised or half-civilised
Government less like a republic than the corrupt and tyrannical
oligarchy of Pretoria, but that’s what he means, and it is to fight for
that and not to fight for the independence of the Transvaal, which he
knows perfectly well is secured by the Imperial Government, that he has
built his forts and imported his German officers, German cannon, and
German rifles and ammunition.
Cecil Rhodes also has an ideal. It is a federation of the South
African states, crown colony, republic and self-governing colony,
each possessing the management of its own affairs, and directing them
according to the will of the majority, and all united under the ægis of
the British flag, and enjoying that equal freedom and security which
cause nineteen out of every twenty emigrants from France and Germany to
go and settle in British colonies rather than in their own.
Which of the two ideals will be realised is not very difficult to see.
The one is artificial, unnatural, and two hundred years behind the
times. The other is natural, logical, and if anything, a little bit
ahead of the times, and the difference between them is not altogether
unlike the difference between Paul Krüger and Cecil Rhodes.
It would, of course, be quite outside the range of human possibility
for a man to have attained to the real greatness of Cecil Rhodes
without having made a good many enemies, public and private.
Of his private enemies there is no need to say very much. In the first
place, until human nature has changed very considerably, it would
be quite impossible for any man to have been so uniformly and so
brilliantly successful as Cecil Rhodes has been without making plenty
of enemies both private and public. One of the very worst methods
of promoting brotherly love in the breasts of men whose standard of
manliness is not quite up to the average is to out-distance them in
the race for political distinction, or to out-wit them in the trickery
of finance--and I don’t suppose that any one would be readier to admit
that, in its ultimate analysis, finance is mainly trickery than Cecil
Rhodes himself.
This category would include practically all the private and personal
enemies of Cecil Rhodes save one. The exception is, I regret to say, a
woman, and that is a fact which naturally blunts the pen of criticism
when it is held in the hands of a man. There would be no need to
mention Mrs. Cronwright-Schreiner--better known in literary circles as
Olive Schreiner--here but for the fact that she has made it impossible
to pass her over without notice by writing the most recent and, I fear
I must also say, the most virulent and untruthful attack that has been
made upon the personal character and public policy of our South African
Empire-Maker.
And yet even this attack is in its way a sort of testimonial to the
greatness of the man whose reputation it was intended to demolish,
despite the fact that in it Cecil Rhodes is depicted as a monster of
iniquity and as the head of a soulless and tyrannical corporation
which has not only been guilty of all the crimes in the Decalogue, but
has invented a few new ones to go on with. Strange to say, however,
when Mrs. Cronwright-Schreiner was once interrupted in one of her
well-known denunciations of the greatest Englishman of his day with
the remark that after all he was a great man, she exclaimed: “A
great man! Of course he is, a very great man, and that’s the pity of
it!” The almost unanimous verdict of the English and South African
press on the deplorable literary and political blunder which Mrs.
Cronwright-Schreiner perpetrated in writing “Trooper Peter Halkett,”
goes far to show that her personal estimate of her enemy is a good deal
more correct than her literary and political estimate.
Of the public enemies of Cecil Rhodes it will suffice to point out
briefly that, without one exception and whatever their nationality,
they are also the enemies of his country. It is noteworthy too that
Cecil Rhodes himself seems to have an instinctive perception of real
as distinguished from apparent or merely superficial hostility to the
British Empire.
He recognised long ago, for instance, that our most dangerous enemies
both at home and abroad are the Germans, and throughout his whole
career he has lost no opportunity of checking and checkmating, so far
as the cowardice and apathy of the Colonial Office has permitted him,
their innumerable and dishonest attempts to undermine the British
supremacy in South Africa.
If I were asked to name the three men who hate him most bitterly I
think I should say Paul Krüger, Dr. W. J. Leyds and the German Emperor.
It is something more than a coincidence that these three men should
also be the bitterest and most determined enemies of the British Empire.
There can hardly be any doubt now in the minds of well-informed people
that the conditions which provoked the pitiful attempt at revolution in
Johannesburg and led up to the Jameson Raid were made in Germany, or
at any rate by German hands. The whole thing was what may be described
with more force than elegance as “a put up job.”
The idea was to goad the Outlanders to revolt, put the rebellion down
by armed force, assert the absolute independence of the Transvaal as a
consequence, and get rid of that awkward clause in the Convention of
1884 which asserts the suzerainty of Great Britain over the Transvaal
by compelling the Pretorian government to submit all its foreign
treaties to the supervision of the Colonial Office.
The next step would have been an offensive and defensive alliance with
Germany, and then, if there had been no Special Squadrons or obstacles
of that sort in the way, the Transvaal would have been gradually
Germanised.
It was this that Cecil Rhodes foresaw when he ordered Dr. Jameson to
mass his men on the Transvaal frontier. This was, in fact, his answer
to the German application to the Portuguese Government for permission
to land sailors and marines from the _See-Adler_ in Delagoa Bay with a
view to sending them up to Pretoria in violation of the most explicit
treaty obligations.
It is quite plain now that Cecil Rhodes intended this force as a
practical hint, and not as an invading army. I remember one night
shortly after the Raid, I was smoking the pipe of peace with some of
the Transvaal officials on the stoep of President Krüger’s house in
Pretoria. We were discussing Cecil Rhodes’s complicity in the Raid,
and in answer to a suggestion that he was at the bottom of it all, I
said: “No doubt Rhodes knew all about it. I needn’t tell you gentlemen
that nothing happens in South Africa that he doesn’t know, but he
never meant Jameson to cross the frontier when he did. If he had meant
invasion he would have had the country by now, but you won’t convince
me that Cecil Rhodes is such a fool as to try and jump the Transvaal
with five hundred men.”
The only answer to this was a general laugh. President Krüger is not
supposed to understand English, but he laughed too.
Of Cecil Rhodes’s enemies at home it is so difficult to speak with
anything like patience that they had better be passed over as briefly
as possible. The unceasing hostility of a certain section of the
British Press may, to some extent, be accounted for by the fact that he
has many powerful financial rivals, and that the Transvaal Government
has almost unique opportunities for bribery.
Few newspapers are quite incorruptible. They are primarily run to
pay, and, therefore, it is hardly to be expected that they should be
entirely proof against the manifold seductions which an individual
millionaire, or a government with a vast secret service fund, is able
to practise upon them.
It is almost impossible to believe that their hostility is really
sincere. They know perfectly well that empire-making cannot be done
with kid gloves on. They know, also, that the amount of actual
good that Cecil Rhodes has done in South Africa, even apart from
empire-making, is almost incalculable. None know this better than the
loyal Dutch burghers of the Cape and the Kaffirs. The former call him
“the Englishman with the Afrikander heart”; the latter call him their
father. But for him there would probably not be many loyal Dutch at
all at the Cape; and but for him also Matabeleland and Mashonaland
would still be the happy hunting-ground of King Lobengula’s murdering,
ravaging, and slave-making impis.
[Illustration: THAT HISTORIC INDABA IN THE MATOPPOS.]
He is, in fact, as was plainly shown in that historic Indaba in the
Matoppos, the one white man in South Africa whom the natives
love and trust. It is not many men who, with millions enough to buy
everything that the world has to sell in the way of comfort and luxury
and honours--as distinguished from honour--who would have gone as
he did, armed only with a walking-stick, into the stronghold of the
Matabele, and there won from them the title of “the bull that separates
the fighting bulls,”--in other words, the peacemaker--and stopped a war
which, if the Imperial authorities had had their way, would have gone
on into the next year, and would have cost four or five millions at
least.
It is, by the way, characteristic of the strength of mind and fixity of
purpose of this man, that he solemnly warned Sir Richard Martin that,
if, after this, the war was continued, he would himself go and live
among the Matabele, and wash his hands of the whole affair.
It is noteworthy, too, that this man, whom Olive Schreiner describes by
the mouth of her impossible trooper as “death on niggers,” is, in the
opinion of the niggers themselves, the greatest friend they ever had.
If all the work of all the societies and associations of amiable old
ladies of both sexes for the Protection of the Aborigines and the
Elevation of the Savage were put together, it would not amount to a
tithe of what Cecil Rhodes has done for the natives of South Africa.
The Glen-Grey Act alone has almost emptied the prisons of kaffir
offenders, and as for his work at Kimberley, the effects of which I
have myself seen, it would be difficult to speak too highly of it.
Thus, for instance, it is not generally known that Cecil Rhodes is the
greatest practical temperance worker in the world. Every one knows that
the curse of all savage races in contact with civilised peoples is
liquor. When he was moving the second reading of the Glen-Grey Act he
said:
“I know the curse of liquor. Personally at the Diamond Fields I have
assisted in making ten thousand of these poor children hard-working
and sober. They are now in compounds, healthy and happy. In their
former condition the place was a hell upon earth, therefore my heart is
thoroughly with the idea of removing liquor from the natives.”
I have myself seen “these poor children” happy, healthy, and sober,
in the compounds of Kimberley. In the Transvaal and the Portuguese
territory I have seen them drunken, degraded, and diseased, and I am in
a position to say that every word of the above quotation is solid fact.
I wonder how many of our professional temperance agitators could point
to such a splendid achievement as that.
It seems, perhaps, a good deal to say of Cecil Rhodes that, not only
has he enormously increased our area of empire in South Africa, but
that he is the only man who can efficiently protect that empire from
the two greatest dangers which threaten it.
These are, first, a war of Dutch against British, such as the Pretorian
Government and its German allies have been trying so hard to bring
about, and for the purposes of which they have been arming themselves
to the teeth; and, second, a general native uprising, which would very
probably follow hard on the heels of the racial war.
Now the only English statesman who is thoroughly believed in by the
Dutch majority at the Cape is Cecil Rhodes, and the only white man who
is thoroughly trusted and respected by the natives of all tribes is
also Cecil Rhodes, and this is a fact which goes very far to account
for the desperate anxiety of the Hollander-German-Boer party in South
Africa and Europe to get him thoroughly disgraced and discredited over
the Jameson fiasco.
The measure of their failure is not only the measure of his triumph. It
is also the measure of the future peace and prosperity of British South
Africa. We live too near the man to see him in his just proportions,
but, unless Downing Street excels, if that be possible, its own
blunders in the past, and unless this royal race of ours suddenly
belies all its best traditions, a day must come when the British flag
will fly over a federated and united South Africa, when the rule of the
Boer will have gone the way of all anachronisms--and in that day men
will look back and see, in juster perspective than we can do, the great
qualities of the man who has made it all possible.
It is probable that in that day the very names of his enemies and
detractors will be forgotten, or remembered only as we remember the
name of Cataline in connection with that of Cicero. Then Cecil Rhodes
will take his place beside Robert Clive and Warren Hastings, and in
some great square of the future Metropolis of the British African
Empire, there will stand a statue of him, and on its base will probably
be inscribed those memorable words of his:--
“All English: That’s my dream!”
And with such words I, too, may fittingly bring to a close this all too
imperfect series of word-portraits of some, at least, of the Men Who
Have Made the Empire.
UNWIN BROTHERS, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON.
* * * * * *
Transcriber’s note:
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors, including occasional missing letters and
punctuation at the ends of some lines, were corrected; unpaired
quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and
otherwise left unpaired.
Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs
and outside quotations.
Page 8: “Oune” probably is a misprint for “Orne”.
Page 204: “Sir Thomas Wren” should be “Sir Christopher Wren”.
Page 261: “countymen” may be a misprint for “countrymen”.
Page 268: “Dafour” was printed that way.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Men Who Have Made the Empire" ***
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