THE ALBERT MEMORIAL, KENSINGTON.
to this kind friend,” she said, “who exercised such a beneficial influence on my religious views; yet people say so much that is cruel and unjust of him, and of my acquaintance with him.”[139] In Germany, her biographer[140] admits “her life and work were not easy,” and she had not the intrepid intellect, the ardent temperament, the caustic wit and the soaring ambition, which enabled her sister, the Crown Princess, to conquer for herself a position of dominant influence in the midst of an unsympathetic Court, and an antipathetic Society. Perhaps this explains why through life she had every year been drawn more closely to the land of her birth, where her worth was more justly appreciated than in the land of her exile. “How deep was her feeling in this respect,” writes the Princess Christian in her touching preface to her sister’s memoirs, “was testified by a request which she made to her husband, in anticipation of her death, that an English flag might be laid on her coffin; accompanying the wish with a modest expression of a hope that no one in the land of her adoption would take umbrage at her desire to be borne to her rest with the old English colours above her.”
CHAPTER XXII.
PEACE WHERE THERE IS NO PEACE.
Ominous Bye-Elections—The Spangles of Imperialism—Disturbed state of Eastern Europe—Origin of the Quarrel with the Zulus—Cetewayo’s Feud with the Boers—A “Prancing Pro-Consul”—Sir Bartle Frere’s Ultimatum to the Zulu King—War Declared—The Crime and its Retribution—The Disaster of Isandhlwana—The Defence of Rorke’s Drift—Demands for the Recall of Sir Bartle Frere—Censured but not Dismissed—Sir Garnet Wolseley Supersedes Sir Bartle Frere in Natal—The Victory of Ulundi—Capture of Cetewayo—End of the War—The Invasion of Afghanistan—Death of Shere Ali—Yakoob Khan Proclaimed Ameer—The Treaty of Gundamuk—The “Scientific Frontier”—The Army Discipline Bill—Mr. Parnell attacks the “Cat”—Mr. Chamberlain Plays to the Gallery—Surrender of the Government—Lord Hartington’s Motion against Flogging—The Irish University Bill—An Unpopular Budget—The Murder of Cavagnari and Massacre of his Suite—The Army of Vengeance—The Re-capture of Cabul—The Settlement of Zululand—Death of Prince Louis Napoleon—The Court-Martial on Lieutenant Carey—Its Judgment Quashed—Marriage of the Duke of Connaught—The Queen at Baveno.
From the bye-elections it was clear, when the New Year (1879) opened, that the prestige of the Ministry was waning. The spangled robe and gaudy diadem of Asiatic Imperialism began to sit uneasily on Constitutional England. The Treaty of Berlin had not brought Englishmen much “honour.” But it had not even brought Europe “peace.” Austria had to make good her hold of Bosnia and Herzegovina by war. Albania was in the hands of a rebel League that executed “Jetdart justice” on Turkish Pashas of the highest rank. Bulgaria and Thrace were only saved from anarchy by the Russian army of occupation. Eastern Roumelia was the scene of daily conflicts between the Turkish troops, and the people of Greece were clamorous to know when Turkey would respond to the invitation of the Conference, and rectify the Hellenic frontier. The discovery that Cyprus was a poor pestilential island, infinitely less valuable than most of the Ionian group, which Englishmen had given to Greece as a gift, was a profound disappointment to popular hopes, and led to an undue and exaggerated depreciation of its value as a place of arms. The Anglo-Turkish Convention was already seen to be a farce. The Sultan, after the resources of diplomatic menace had been well-nigh exhausted, conceded to the agents of England in Asia Minor a few illusory rights of surveillance. But he set on foot no reforms, and he made it plain that he would resist to the death any attempt to “open up” his Asiatic provinces under a British Protectorate to the enterprise of the British projector and pioneer. The Afghan War was unpopular, and though victory did not prove, as was feared, inconstant to our arms, the people seemed convinced, from the history of the first and second Afghan Wars, that a triumph would be almost as disastrous in its cost to India as a defeat. It was impossible now to conceal the fact that when the Indian troops were brought to Malta, the country was placed in a position of far greater peril than had been imagined. While Ministers were wasting their energies in protecting more or less imaginary interests in Eastern Europe, they were apparently quite ignorant that their policy had exposed the vital interests of the Empire to attack in Asia. Nay, it was seen that their policy of irritating and menacing the Afghan Ameer, and of terrifying the Native Princes with enforced disarmament, had rendered it easy for Russia, without doing more than giving our enemies and discontented feudatories merely some unofficial support, to shake the fabric of Indian Empire to its very centre. To put the Imperial Crown of India down among the stakes in Lord Beaconsfield’s game with Russia in Europe was magnificent. But men of sense and prudence now began to suspect that it was not good business or good diplomacy. Never was England less restful or less easy in mind. Abroad Lord Beaconsfield, as was said, had created a situation which was neither peace with its security, nor war with its happy chances. At home the classes were groaning over the collapse of their most remunerative investments, and the masses writhing under a fall of wages, which, in many trades, amounted to fifty per cent. To complete the popular feeling of depression, it was plain that the Government were fast drifting into another Kaffir War. On the 3rd of February, 1879, in fact, it was officially announced that hostilities with the Zulus had begun.
There is no difficulty in understanding the causes of the Zulu War. The Zulu king (Cetewayo) had ever been a staunch ally of England. But he had a blood-feud with the Boers of the Transvaal, and he claimed part of their territory as having been originally stolen by them from his race. When England in an evil moment annexed the Transvaal, she found that she took over with it the quarrel of the Boers with the Zulus. Cetewayo pressed his claims all the more confidently that a friendly Power now held the land which had been taken from him. In every colony there is a clique of land-speculators, who also, as a rule, form the War Party, and, by a singular coincidence, net most of the profits that are to be derived from a colonial war waged at the expense of the British taxpayer. This Party in Natal ridiculed the notion of giving Cetewayo his land. They also stirred up a war panic, vowing that the Zulus were only waiting for a favourable opportunity to pounce upon Natal and exterminate the Europeans. Sir Bartle Frere—“a prancing pro-consul,” as Sir William Harcourt called him—was High Commissioner at the Cape, and the Commander-in-Chief of the Forces there was Lord Chelmsford. A more ominous combination could hardly be imagined. Sir Bartle Frere even in India had been a hot annexationist. He had the restless brain to devise schemes of conquest, whilst his military colleague had neither the brain nor nerve to carry them out. The Blue-books indicate that Sir Bartle Frere had been preparing beforehand a grand project of conquest in South Africa.[141] Unfortunately, Sir M. Hicks-Beach was not sharp enough to detect and blight this scheme in the bud, and it is doubtful if he even suspected its existence till he was galvanised into vigilance by the startling ultimatum which Sir Bartle Frere suddenly sent to the Zulu king. The award of the British Boundary Commissioners on the dispute between the Zulus and the Boers had been in favour of the Zulus. It was given in June, 1878. Yet it had been kept back by Sir Bartle Frere, apparently to stimulate the War Party among the Zulus with the provocation of delay. Then when it was communicated to King Cetewayo, there was tacked on to it an irrelevant and menacing demand that King Cetewayo should immediately disband his whole army. “To make the case our own,” wrote Lord Blachford, one of the highest living authorities on Colonial Policy, “it is as if the Emperor of Germany, in concluding with us a Treaty of Commerce, suddenly annexed a notice that he would make war on us in six weeks unless before the expiration of that time we burnt our Navy.”[142] And the ultimatum was not only a crime, but a hideous blunder. To annihilate instead of utilising the Zulu power was to relieve the Boers of the Transvaal from the pressure on their flank that alone prevented them from throwing off the British yoke. But it was of no use to argue the case on the grounds of justice or common sense. “The men who had been in the country”—who always come forward to defend every act of folly that is about to be perpetrated in a distant colony—dinned their defence of Sir Bartle Frere into the ears of Englishmen, who were at last half persuaded that it must be the duty of England to exterminate the Zulus, when a satrap like Sir Bartle Frere was eager to annihilate them in the interests of Christianity. Moreover, as in the case of the Afghan War, the people were kept in utter ignorance of the arrogant ultimatum by which Frere had gone out of his way to fix a quarrel on King Cetewayo.
But if the crime was rank, the retribution by which it was avenged was swift and stern. Chelmsford’s advance guard crossed the Tugela on the 12th of January. A petty success was recorded at Ekowe on the 7th, and then on the 22nd of January the English column at Isandhlwana was smitten as with the sword of Gideon. Our troops were beaten not only in the actual conflict, but they were out-manœuvred and out-generalled. The barbarians under Cetewayo had fought like lions, and they had inflicted on a British army a defeat so disgraceful that the history of half a century supplies no parallel to it. Frere, like a reckless gambler, had staked everything on this cast of the die. Neither he nor Chelmsford had made provision for a disaster, and the result was that the rout of Isandhlwana left the whole colony of Natal, even then discounting the spoils of victory, open to invasion. Nothing, in fact, stood between the Europeans in Natal and extermination, save the little post of Rorke’s Drift. There Lieutenants Bromhead and Chard, with a handful of men, stemmed the tide of invasion, and redeemed the honour of England which had been smirched by the political incapacity of Frere, and the military failure of Chelmsford. In vain did the Queen and the Duke of
ISANDHLWANA: THE DASH WITH THE COLOURS.