By August 22nd Lord Hartington had 'come round so fast that he told us he would be able to evacuate Cairo even before our meeting in October.' On August 31st Sir Charles Dilke 'received Sir Evelyn Wood, who was anxious to assure me that he was perfectly able to hold Egypt with his Egyptians.'
The report did not wholly convince Sir Charles, and he expressed some of his doubts to Lord Granville, with whom Sir Evelyn Wood had been staying at Walmer.
'Lord Granville wrote: "His conversation gives one more the notion of activity, energy, and conscientiousness, than of great ability. I presume you were not able to slip in a question, but, on the other hand, if you had succeeded he would not have heard it. He is in favour of the complete evacuation of Cairo…. He has full confidence in that half of the Egyptian Army which is officered by English officers. He has only a negative confidence in the other half. Evelyn Baring will find a private letter on his arrival, and a despatch by this mail, instructing him to send us a full report. Till we get this we had better not go beyond the declarations which have already been publicly made." Baring had just (September, '83) reached Cairo as Consul- General.'
Government policy shaped itself on the assumption that Sir Evelyn Wood was right. On October 25th
'we formally decided to leave Cairo and concentrate a force of between 2,000 and 3,000 men at Alexandria. This was no new decision, but was taken on this occasion in order that the Queen should be informed, which had not previously been done.'
Ten days after this date the Egyptian Army of the Soudan, under General Hicks, was destroyed by the Mahdi in Kordofan. The news only reached Cairo on November 22nd, and the question was now raised as to what should become of the upper valley of the Nile.
'On December 12th there was a meeting at the War Office about the Soudan, Lord Granville, Hartington, Northbrook, Carlingford, and myself, being present, with Wolseley in the next room, and the Duke of Cambridge in the next but one. We again told the Egyptians that they had better leave the Soudan and defend Egypt at Wady Halfa, and that we would help them to defend Egypt proper. Wolseley was at one time called in, as was Colonel Stewart, the last man who had left Khartoum. Lord Granville told Hartington, who was starting for Windsor, what to tell the Queen, and I noted that "the old stagers, like Lord Granville and Mr. Gladstone, waste a great deal of their time on concocting stories for the Queen, who is much too clever to be taken in by them, and always ends by finding out exactly what they are doing. It is certainly a case where honesty would be a better policy."
'I cannot but think that Malet was largely responsible for the state of things in Egypt (Lord Granville being so far responsible that I had much difficulty in getting him to interfere against Malet), and that we had interfered somewhat late…. Malet left before the army commanded by Hicks was surrounded, and it was on Baring that the blow fell. But Baring was always strongly opposed to the attempt of the Egyptians to reconquer the Soudan, and, moreover, thought that they were quite unfit to govern it. Immediately after the bad news about Hicks first came, Baring told us that Khartoum must fall, and recommended us to tell the Egyptian Government, which we did, that under no circumstances must they expect the assistance of British or Indian troops in the Soudan. We even stopped their sending Wood's army to the Soudan, and we told Baring not to encourage retired British officers to volunteer, and told him to recommend the evacuation of the Soudan. On December 3rd Baring sent us a most able report upon the whole situation, and he and General Stephenson commanding the British troops, Sir Evelyn Wood commanding the Egyptian Army, and General Baker, were all of opinion that it was impossible to hold Khartoum, and that the Egyptians must be made to fall back on Wady Halfa. On the other hand, the Egyptian Government could not make up their minds to leave Khartoum. Malet up to the last days of his stay in Egypt was rendering himself, in fact, responsible for the Hicks expedition and for the Soudan policy of the Egyptians, and there is one fatal despatch of his in existence in which he relates how he interfered, at the wish of Hicks, to suggest a change of Egyptian Governor. He was privately censured for this, but he was publicly approved for his whole course, and therefore we were in a sense responsible, although we expressly repudiated this responsibility in our despatches to him, and forced the Egyptian Government to acknowledge that they thoroughly understood our repudiation. The only thing that could have been done more than was done would have been to have publicly censured Malet, and Lord Granville should have had the courage to do this.
'In September I had succeeded in getting Edgar Vincent appointed to the Egyptian Cabinet as the English financier, virtually Prime Minister; but, able as he was, it was a long time before he felt his feet, and could take the government into his own hands.' [Footnote: When on August 15th Mr. (afterwards Sir) Edgar Vincent dined in Sloane Street with Edward Hamilton, Mr. Gladstone's private secretary, and some other people, Sir Charles noted that he 'was once more struck with the extraordinary strength displayed by Vincent for a man of twenty-four.']
'Two additional points concerning Egypt which should be mentioned here are, in the first place, Lord Granville's mistake in creating a place with Egyptian pay, at Lord Spencer's wish, for Clifford Lloyd, who had made Ireland too hot to hold him; and, in the second place, the violent protests of the Anti-Slavery Society, backed up by ours in December, as to the employment of Zebehr Pasha. We should undoubtedly have been censured by the House of Commons had we allowed any important place to have been given to Zebehr Pasha, but it was difficult to prevent it when it was wished both by the Egyptians and by Baring—given the fact that we had washed our hands of their Soudan policy.