When the badly strung out relief force reached Hlazakazi at about 0600, bringing the troops operating in the area to about 2,500, the Zulu on Magogo had broken away. Some had withdrawn south-east onto the Phindo heights and others north onto Silutshana, both with the intention of ultimately pulling back northeast to Siphezi and drawing the British after them, away from the camp. Dartnell took the bait, and became involved in a heavy skirmish on Phindo. Unaware of falling into a trap, Chelmsford decided to let Dartnell get on with taking Phindo, while the relief column cleared the area around Silutshana and the Nondweni valley between Magogo and Phindo. The General would use the opportunity to select a suitable new campsite for the column when it advanced, thereby adhering to his own precept that ‘A commander must ride about and see the country for himself, or he will never be able to handle his troops properly.’81 At 0930 while breakfasting near Magogo he received a message sent at 0805 by Pulleine that Zulu were advancing on the camp. No one suspected this could be the main Zulu army, and there seemed no sense of urgency in the message. Chelmsford himself, when Clery asked him what should be done, replied, ‘There is nothing to be done on that.’ His staff did not pursue the matter because he had become ‘particularly touchy about suggestions being made to him’.82 Chelmsford nevertheless sent Lieutenant A Berkeley Milne, RN of his staff to study the camp 12 miles away through a telescope from the slopes of Magogo. Milne kept watch for upwards to an hour, but saw nothing untoward. In fact, the shoulder of Silutshana cut off his view of the plain to the east of Isandlwana where the Zulu army was deploying. Since all seemed in order, between 1000 and 1100 Chelmsford sent Captain Alan Gardner with orders to Pulleine to strike camp and move up. Chelmsford and a small escort rode off between 1030 and 1230 to scout the area. His movements were consequently unpredictable, and all subsequent messages concerning the unfolding battle at Isandlwana failed to find him or his staff. Having decided on a suitable campsite just east of Hlazakazi on the Mangeni River above its spectacular horseshoe falls, Chelmsford ordered the relief column under Glyn to concentrate there.
In the early afternoon sounds of firing were heard from the direction of the camp, and messages from the camp’s garrison began to reach Chelmsford. Clery afterwards wrote that at that stage he heard Crealock exclaim: ‘How very amusing! Actually attacking our camp! Most amusing!’83 Shortly after 1315 Chelmsford went up Mdutshana hill just north of the new Mangeni campsite with some of his staff to examine the Isandlwana camp through their field glasses. The tents had not been struck as were the regulations during an engagement, and all seemed quiet. Chelmsford therefore came to the conclusion that if there had been a Zulu attack, it had been successfully repulsed. It was only at 1445 that Chelmsford decided to return to Isandlwana at a leisurely pace with a small escort to investigate. About 5 miles from Isandlwana he was met by Lonsdale, who had ridden back to Isandlwana to arrange for supplies to be brought up, and he reported that he had barely escaped the Zulu who were in possession of the camp. Chelmsford was appalled, purportedly exclaiming in disbelief: ‘But I left over 1,000 men to guard the camp.’ Chelmsford then acted decisively. He ordered the already exhausted forces concentrating at the Mangeni campsite 7 miles to the south-west of Isandlwana to retake the camp, though it was not until 1830 that Chelmsford had concentrated all his scattered forces within 3 miles of Isandlwana. Clery later described ‘the look of gloom and pain’ on Chelmsford’s ‘expressive’ countenance, which clearly mirrored his inner turmoil.84 Indeed, a soldier wrote home that he was ‘very near crying’.85 But Chelmsford never ‘flunked’ his duty and, anticipating Zulu resistance, addressed his dismayed troops with determination: ‘Men, the enemy has taken our camp. Many of our friends must have lost their lives defending it. There is nothing left for us now but to fight our way through – and mind, we must fight hard, for we will have to fight for our lives. I know you, and I know I can depend on you.’86
The men cheered lustily in response. Chelmsford then advanced in darkness with his force in battle array, guns in the centre with British infantry on either flank, a battalion of NNC on each flank of the regulars with the mounted troops in advance of the NNC. Chelmsford halted half a mile from the camp to fire shrapnel. But the victorious Zulu had taken the camp at about 1400 and after looting it had withdrawn, so Chelmsford reoccupied it at about 2030 without resistance, though he remained on the alert for a night attack that never came. It was a horrific night spent bivouacked, as he laconically informed Frere, ‘among the bodies from dead soldiers and of the enemy’.87
For the loss of about 1,000 men, the Zulu had killed 52 of the 67 British officers, 739 white troops, 67 white NCOs of the NNC and 471 recorded black troops out of a total of 1,707 men left to defend the camp. The defeat at Isandlwana comprehensively shattered Chelmsford’s invasion plans. The heavy loss of life, weapons, ammunition and transport meant that he could make no further advance until his forces had regrouped and been reinforced and fresh transport assembled. Until then, he would have to stand on the defensive and do his best to rally the defences of Natal where panicking colonists were in daily expectation of a Zulu invasion. The stout defence of Rorke’s Drift on the night of 22/23 January helped neutralise somewhat the shattering effects of Isandlwana, but it was now clear that if the British were to maintain their prestige in southern Africa they had to prosecute the war until the Zulu were utterly defeated in the field.
The Isandlwana disaster severely affected Chelmsford’s health and morale, and for a time he seemed on the verge of a breakdown. Crealock reported several times to Alison in early February that the General was ‘still not himself’.88 Chelmsford unguardedly admitted in an official dispatch of 9 February to Colonel Frederick Stanley, the Secretary of State for War, that ‘the strain of prolonged anxiety & exertion, physical & mental’ was ‘telling’ on him.89 This missive, along with others requesting a major general be sent out as second-in-command lest he break down under the strain, caused the Duke of Cambridge great embarrassment when he had to explain them away to his sceptical peers in the House of Lords. Chelmsford was later ‘extremely annoyed’ when he learned that what he considered confidential correspondence should have been made humiliatingly public.90 To Evelyn Wood, the energetic commander of No. 4 Column, he wrote that he was ‘fairly puzzled’ when he contemplated future operations, and wished he saw his way ‘with honour out of this beastly country’. He added that he was depending on Wood and his dashing commander of mounted troops, Lieutenant Colonel Redvers Buller, to pull him ‘out of the mire’.91 In reporting the ‘sad disaster’ to Cambridge he had, moreover, to explain why he had not remained long enough at the Isandlwana camp to bury the dead (as was expected of a commander), excusing himself primarily in terms of preserving the men’s morale.92 But the dead would continue to lie there, unburied until May, to haunt his reputation.
Chelmsford’s first act after Isandlwana was to convene a Court of Inquiry on 24 January that sat from 27–29 January. Its instruction was to inquire very specifically into ‘the loss of the camp’, rather than into the surrounding circumstances that led to the Zulu taking it. Clearly, Chelmsford intended that the Court would not probe too deeply into his responsibility for the disaster. Much of the evidence heard was not recorded, since it was deemed irrelevant or repetitious. Conveniently for Chelmsford’s reputation, the Court found that much of the blame for the disaster could be attributed to the imprudent actions of Durnford to whom, so Crealock claimed, he had sent written instruction on the morning of 22 January to take command of the camp. When Durnford (who had then purportedly inherited the superseded Pulleine’s orders) moved out of the camp to support Chelmsford, whom he thought threatened to the rear by a Zulu movement, he allegedly overrode the written orders that Clery stated he had drawn up on his own initiative without consulting Chelmsford requiring Pulleine to stay strictly on the defensive.93 Thus when Durnford encountered the Zulu advancing in force, Pulleine was forced against his instructions (so the argument went) to push troops forward in a haphazard manner to cover Durnford’s retreat, thereby fatally over-extending the British line. Much emphasis was accorded the poor performance of the NNC, whose apparent collapse in the centre of the British line led (it was concluded) to the final Zulu breakthrough. In other words, the Court apportioned the blame for the disaster primarily to the conveniently dead Durnford, who was disliked by the military establishment for being too closely aligned with the colonial viewpoint after years in Natal; to a lesser extent to Pulleine, who was known to be a good administrator but short on combat experience; and to the NNC, who were equally conveniently neither white nor regular British infantry. With the honour of both Chelmsford and the regular British troops secured and the blame thrown on suspect officers, colonials and Africans, this is the version that passed into the official account.94
Eventually, the fatal holes in the official account would begin to reveal themselves. For one thing, when Crealock’s instructions to Durnford were subsequently recovered from the battlefield, they showed that he had been merely ordered up to the camp without precise instructions either to reinforce it or take command. Earlier orders issued on 19 January had specified that he cooperate with No. 3 Column in clearing the country occupied by Matshana,95 and it can be argued that is exactly what he was trying to do on 22 January. Clery later explained to Alison that when Chelmsford marched out of camp on the morning of 22 January he ‘had not the smallest apprehension about the camp being attacked’ and had thought to leave no special instructions for its defence. Thus when Clery told him he had left written orders, the General, who saw how this would save his reputation, exclaimed: ‘I cannot tell you what a relief it is to me to hear this.’96 Yet these written instructions, if they ever existed, were never found. Much was made of Pulleine’s combat inexperience, but in fact his forward deployment was essentially in accordance with the instructions Chelmsford had issued column commanders in December 1878: guns forward with supporting flanking companies of British troops thrown back; the NNC clear of each flank and to their rear in echelon; mounted infantry covering the flanks; and a reserve of British infantry. Of course, whether an extended firing line was the most appropriate deployment may be questioned, though at the battle of Nyezane on the same day as Isandlwana, this was precisely the deployment used with great success by Pearson of No. 1 Column.97 And, as a result of modern research, it is clear that the British line did not collapse because the NNC broke. Indeed, the extended skirmishing line falling back on the camp was holding its own well until its flanks were turned by the Zulu advance.
It is very clear that Chelmsford’s staff and close associates were rallying around their chief to protect his reputation,98 and not being too nice about how they did it. Perhaps the most unsavoury ploy was that initiated by Crealock who, some weeks after Isandlwana, tried to shift some of the blame for the disaster off Chelmsford’s shoulders on to those of Glyn. The guileless but upright Glyn resolutely refused to take the fall, not least because it was well known that Chelmsford had entirely taken over effective command of the column, leaving him only with the discharge of routine duties. Distinctly embarrassed, Chelmsford hastened to disassociate himself from Crealock’s dishonourable insinuations and, according to witnesses, hauled him over the coals for not behaving as a gentleman. As Captain J F Maurice later expressed it: ‘Crealock certainly comes out in a very unpleasant light … The attempt to turn on Glyn … was as feeble as it was unfair.’99
The court’s convenient finding was not sufficient to still criticism and angry public questioning in both Natal and Britain about Chelmsford’s conduct of the war and his attempt to shift the blame for Isandlwana.100 His own staff discreetly questioned his generalship.101 Initially, though, the government stood by Chelmsford in harsh parliamentary debates that excoriated him for culpable incapacity as a commander, the Horse Guards for shielding his incompetence and the government for starting the unfortunate war in the first place.102 On 16 February 1879 the government agreed to Chelmsford’s urgent request for reinforcements and dispatched 6 battalions, 2 cavalry regiments, 2 artillery batteries and a company of engineers to Natal. By the end of March Chelmsford felt strong enough to march to the relief of Eshowe where the Zulu had been blockading No. 1 Column ever since Isandlwana. Chelmsford was determined to avoid his previous mistakes, and this time organised effective forward reconnaissance and while on the march painstakingly laagered every night. On the early morning of 1 April, the 5,670 men of the Eshowe Relief Column under Chelmsford’s ‘personal command’ (as he could not resist reminding Stanley in his official dispatch that hums with a deep sense of personal vindication) routed the Zulu force of 10,000 men that attacked his laager at Gingindlovu. He then evacuated the Eshowe garrison.103 Meanwhile, on 29 March at Khambula, far away in north-western Zululand, Wood had already routed the Zulu veterans of Isandlwana in a ferocious pitched battle. Khambula would prove the turning point of the war and the ruination of Zulu morale because it proved to the Zulu (a realisation confirmed at Gingindlovu) that they could not prevail against the British if they failed to catch them in the open as they had at Isandlwana, and that it was hopeless to attack them in prepared positions. Yet for once the usually punctiliously courteous Chelmsford could not bring himself to rise to the occasion, writing to his far too successful subordinate: ‘One line to congratulate you upon your successful repulse of the attack made upon Kambula laager – I am up to my ears in work & cannot say as much as I could wish …’.104
The overwhelming victories at Khambula and Gingindlovu greatly buoyed up Chelmsford, who grasped that he had entirely regained the initiative. Yet it was not immediately clear to him what strategy he ought to follow in order to bring the war to an end. He seemed embarrassed by the large number of reinforcements rushed out to him by the anxious government, and was swamped by special-service officers anxious for action and promotion. He also had to allocate suitable commands for the four major generals Cambridge selected to accompany the troops, and whom he described with more regard to their proven loyalty to him (none being a Wolseley man) than to their abilities as ‘excellent men, very intelligent, reliable and active’.105 Moreover, the growing concentration of troops in Natal was putting intolerable strain on his Commissariat and Transport Department, which had already shown itself unequal to the demands placed upon it and now had to arrange for additional transport and supplies and establish depots. One thing, though, was clear to Chelmsford. This time he would exercise extreme caution to avoid a repetition of Isandlwana, and his second invasion of Zululand was characterised by his uninspiring motto: ‘slow and steady wins the race’.106
Although his senior officers had advocated sending in a single column to place less strain on the Commissariat and Transport Department, Chelmsford eventually decided to send in two widely spaced columns to screen the Transvaal and Natal from a possible Zulu counter-blow.107 The 1st Division of 7,500 men, under Major General Henry Crealock, was to advance on oNdini up the coast. The 2nd Division of 5,000 men, under Major General Edward Newdigate and accompanied by Chelmsford, was to march on oNdini from the north-west, on the way rendezvousing with Wood’s 3,200 men, now renamed the Flying Column. The 2nd Division would not advance along the same route as the ill-fated No. 3 Column, but would take a longer and unfamiliar route that required much reconnaissance, but which avoided Isandlwana and the still unburied British dead. On 21 May, however, while the 2nd Division was concentrating at Landman’s Drift and sending out patrols to clear the country ahead of it, a reconnaissance in force began the long-overdue interment at Isandlwana, stilling both public criticism and Chelmsford’s own uneasy conscience.108
As a strong believer in the ‘active defence’, Chelmsford ordered diversionary raids by colonial troops across the Natal–Zululand border in support of his own advance. This brought him into sharp conflict with Bulwer and the Natal government, who correctly feared a damaging cycle of raid and counter-raid would be initiated. Much to the indignation of Chelmsford, who claimed command over all troops in the area of operations, Bulwer forbade the use of Natal troops in cross-border raids. Relations between General and Lieutenant Governor swiftly deteriorated, and both bombarded the home authorities with inordinately long and intemperate dispatches.109
This shrill dispute was one of the final straws for a British government that already perceived Chelmsford to be demoralised, uncertain of his strategy and unable to bring the increasingly expensive war to a speedy conclusion.110 The public had heaped criticism upon Chelmsford after Isandlwana, but he had survived thus far in his command thanks to the increasingly grudging support of the Horse Guards and of the Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Disraeli had left Chelmsford Senior out of his Cabinet in 1868 because he thought him an incompetent Lord Chancellor, and it distressed him to have to supersede the son as an incompetent general.111 Cambridge had initially stood staunchly behind Chelmsford, but was anxious to understand better what had gone wrong at Isandlwana, which had hit him like ‘a clap of thunder’.112
On 6 March the AG, Major General Sir Charles Ellice, wrote to Chelmsford requesting satisfactory replies to seven searching questions on issues not covered adequately by the Court of Inquiry. Over the next months Chelmsford and his staff scrambled to come up with acceptable explanations, but their inadequacies left the Duke ever more perplexed and irritated.113 At the same time that he started pressing for better answers about what had gone wrong at Isandlwana, the Duke was also becoming acutely conscious of Chelmsford’s ineffectual logistical arrangements. In March the Duke sent out his ADC, Major General the Hon. Sir Henry Clifford, VC as Inspector General of Line of Communications and Base and to succeed to Chelmsford’s command should he break down or die. Clifford resented that his command stopped at the Zulu border and was assiduous in denigrating Chelmsford’s conduct of the second invasion to the home authorities. Chelmsford had initially welcomed Clifford’s energetic efficiency in moving up supplies, but the latter’s criticisms eventually stung him deeply.114 Whatever the wrongs or rights of this fresh dispute, it did Chelmsford’s reputation no good. Now even Cambridge began severely to question his conduct of the campaign.115 The cabinet met three times between 19 and 23 May to discuss the South African situation. In a letter of 27 May Disraeli reported to the Queen (who was inclined to support Chelmsford): ‘No one upheld Lord Chelmsford. Even the Secretary of War gave him up, and spoke as if the military authorities had done the same.’116 The Cabinet’s reverse judgement of Solomon was to create a single, unified command in South Africa that would subordinate both Chelmsford and Bulwer, and sideline Frere. Cambridge suggested Chelmsford’s old commander, Napier, for the post but, to the fury of the Horse Guards, the cabinet selected Wolseley instead.117 Chelmsford learned on 16 June of Wolseley’s appointment, but was not appraised of the terms until 5 July, the day after his victory at the battle of Ulundi. In fact, it was only on 9 July that he at last received formal notice of his supersession.118 Until then he continued to act as if he were still Officer Commanding in South Africa, although sure knowledge that Wolseley was on his way undoubtedly spurred him on to bring the war to a successful conclusion before his rival could rob him of the credit.119 Although Chelmsford did his best to maintain an imperturbable front, back in England a bitter Lady Chelmsford understood well how ‘insulting’ her ‘cruelly abused’ husband found it to be ‘thrown over by the Govt. without a word of thanks for all his hard work’.120
Yet further misfortunes and vexations continued to dog Chelmsford’s path. On 1 June the Prince Imperial of France – who was accompanying his headquarters as an observer, and whose safety Chelmsford had assured Cambridge and the Empress Eugénie he would look after ‘to the best of my ability’121 – was killed while out on a patrol he had joined without Chelmsford’s prior knowledge.122 The Prince’s death, the probing questions in Parliament,123 the publicity surrounding the subsequent court martial of Lieutenant J B Carey (the officer in command of the patrol) and the popular impression that the latter was being made a scapegoat for the folly of his superiors, all occasioned as much consternation in Britain as the battle of Isandlwana, and further damned Chelmsford in the public eye.124 Unfortunately for Chelmsford, he was very inept in his handling of the war correspondents that by 1879 were a standard presence with any British army on active service, and who were now joining his force in growing numbers. Determined self-publicists like Wolseley cultivated them to ensure a laudatory press, but Chelmsford, smarting deeply at press criticisms he considered ill-informed if not plainly malicious, could not bring himself to work positively with the war correspondents he so clearly despised and mistrusted.125
The slow, over-methodical advance of the 1st Division up the coast bore out the criticisms of those officers who had opposed the independent operations of a second column, but it was effective in securing the surrender of most of the coastal region even before the battle of Ulundi.126 Cetshwayo made increasingly desperate efforts to negotiate with Chelmsford, but the General demanded crushing and impossible terms to ensure that Zulu resistance would have to continue until he had achieved the total victory in the field he was so determined upon to vindicate his reputation.127 Bedevilled after 24 June by a stream of orders and suggestions from a frustrated Wolseley, who had arrived in Cape Town on 24 June but was not able to reach the front until 7 July,128 Chelmsford cautiously advanced on Ulundi, his cavalry carefully reconnoitering the route ahead, while the troops laagered every night and regularly halted to establish fortified supply depots along the line of communications.129
On 4 July Chelmsford drew up his force in an infantry square in the Mahlabathini plain in the very heart of the Zulu kingdom where the amakhanda were clustered. The Zulu attack wilted before the concentrated British fire and the amabutho fled from a devastating mounted counter-attack. Decisively defeated in the open field, the Zulu knew further resistance was pointless, and the warriors immediately dispersed to their homes. With his army routed, his amakhanda burned and his chiefs hastily submitting, King Cetshwayo himself fled to the north.130 Yet nothing Chelmsford ever did now went unquestioned. Immediately after the battle he withdrew his forces south to his base on Mthonjaneni instead of advancing north to consolidate his victory, as his critics later said he ought to have done. His decision was influenced by his shortage of supplies and the need to get his men under cover in bitter winter weather, as well as by his knowledge that organised Zulu resistance was no longer likely. Still, it cannot be ignored that a desire to leave South Africa as soon as possible was also playing its part now that Wolseley would imminently be in a position to assert his new authority. Chelmsford accordingly resigned his command on 5 July.131 And four days later he wrote to Colonel Stanley informing him that he intended to make his way to England with ‘as little delay as possible’ in order (as he bitingly put it) to ‘extricate myself from a false position’.132 Cambridge subsequently considered the decision to return home only wise, because his position would have proven ‘difficult, not to say embarrassing’ if he had remained in South Africa.133
Nevertheless, as Clery wrote on 12 July: ‘There is one universal feeling of extreme satisfaction that Lord C. fought the battle of Ulundi before his successor arrived. However one’s opinion of him as a general may be shaken, everybody’s regard and sympathy for him is as strong is it can be.’134 Colonists in Pietermaritzburg and Durban received Chelmsford with rapturous acclaim, all previous criticism of his blunders erased by final victory over the Zulu. With their plaudits ringing in his ears, Chelmsford took ship at Cape Town on 27 July.135 Wolseley, in a sly letter of farewell, assured Chelmsford that ‘with the halo of success’ he would be cordially received at the Horse Guards and the War Office, though he could not answer for those outside the Duke’s circle.136 But there Wolseley was wrong. On 11 August 1879 Ellice wrote to Chelmsford on behalf of the Duke making abundantly clear the latter’s dissatisfaction with Chelmsford’s responses to his enquiry of 6 March concerning Isandlwana, and spelling out the damning conclusions on his generalship. Chelmsford was found guilty of generally underestimating the Zulu, of adopting a poor invasion strategy that did not sufficiently concentrate his forces, of unwisely dividing the column on 22 January, of not reconnoitering sufficiently and of leaving the camp without proper defences.137 Chelmsford could be left in no doubt where he now stood with his erstwhile patron.
His reception in England was otherwise mixed. Beaconsfield refused to accord the general who had brought such discredit upon his ministry anything but the coldest formal interview, and did not mince his words in itemising in damning detail to the Queen his reasons. But the Queen was determined to invite Chelmsford to Balmoral because she believed it showed ‘a want of generosity’ to condemn him unheard.138 The Queen was favourably impressed when she received Chelmsford, and in August 1879 he was made GCB. As Wolseley snarled in his journal with perceptive paranoia: ‘Because he is my Lord, society will back him up, the court included, & because all the Horse Guards clique, the Duke and all his old fashioned set included … hate me most bitterly, every endeavour will be made by them to cry him up hoping thereby to keep me down’.139
In the event, although Chelmsford maintained a dignified reticence in the face of his critics, and although Ulundi had gone some way to restoring his honour and reputation, he found rehabilitation difficult. Isandlwana in particular continued to haunt him. On 19 August and 2 September 1880 he was faced with the ordeal of having to defend his own conduct of the Zululand campaign in the House of Lords before his peers. The opposition peer, Lord Strathnairn, led the extremely well-informed and acute assault on Chelmsford’s generalship, focussing on his part in the Isandlwana disaster. Chelmsford replied with eloquence and at length, supported by government peers, but Strathnairn remained as unconvinced as Cambridge the previous year. His were the last and telling (if inelegant) words in the debate: ‘Whatever might be said, there were not the necessary precautions taken to protect a camp in which most of our stores were.’140
In the course of his defence Chelmsford had again attempted to shift the blame to Durnford, blaming him for his impulsive disregard of orders. This provoked a determined response from Durnford’s brother Edward and from Frances Colenso (the daughter of the controversially heretical and pro-Zulu Anglican Bishop of Natal), who had been romantically attached to Durnford. Their crusade took the form of letters to the newspapers, a pamphlet and two books,141 and culminated in 1886 at a court of inquiry in Natal. To Chelmsford’s relief, the court exonerated Captain Theophilus Shepstone from Frances Colenso’s bizarre charge that he had removed papers from Durnford’s body and suppressed them to protect Chelmsford’s reputation.142
The Durnford issue caused Chelmsford much private vexation and embarrassment.143 As far as his military career went, his reputation at the Horse Guards had been too badly tarnished for him ever again to be offered an active command, although the Queen conspicuously favoured him with honours. In April 1882 he was promoted to the permanent rank of lieutenant general. The Queen exerted her influence to have him appointed Lieutenant of the Tower, a position he held from June 1884 to March 1889. He became a full general in December 1888, evaded compulsory retirement in 1889 and was finally placed on the retired list only on 7 June 1893. In January 1898 he was appointed colonel of his old regiment, the Sherwood Foresters (Derbyshire Regiment), as the 95th was now called, and in September 1900 was transferred to the 2nd Life Guards. The Queen then appointed him Gold Stick, a ceremonial office open to Colonels of the Life Guards that required personal attendance on the sovereign at all state occasions. On his accession in January 1901, King Edward VII retained Chelmsford as Gold Stick and in 1902 made him GCVO. Gilded with honours, Chelmsford died in London on 9 April 1905 following a sudden seizure while playing billiards at the magnificent but ponderous United Service Club (‘the Senior’) in Pall Mall. Appropriately, the club stood across the road from the Crimean War memorial cast from the bronze of Russian guns captured at Sebastopol where Chelmsford had been present fifty years before.144 Chelmsford was buried in a simple granite tomb carved with a plain cross behind his father’s heraldically ornate resting place in London’s Brompton Cemetery.145
In its accompanying commentary on ‘Spy’s’ caricature of a gawky, ill-at-ease Chelmsford published a year after Chelmsford had been humiliatingly compelled to defend his generalship before his peers in the House of Lords, Vanity Fair condescendingly but not unfairly concluded: ‘Lord Chelmsford is not a bad man; … But nature has refused to him the qualities of a great captain.’146 The perceptive Clery had come to much the same opinion soon after the Isandlwana debacle when he wrote: ‘I feel greatly for the poor general, for nothing could exceed his energy about everything, but I fear there have been some sad miscalculations about the whole business and that the enemy has been altogether underestimated.’147
Certainly, there is no doubting Chelmsford’s professionalism, dedication to duty and care for the men under his command. Nor did he prove unwilling to learn from his mistakes, for he successfully adjusted his tactics during the latter stages of the Zululand campaign. His plodding, over-methodical strategy, on the other hand, distinctly lacked flair or dash. Inadequate staff support compounded his reluctance to delegate, and he consequently allowed himself to be overwhelmed by the pettifogging administrative work of managing a campaign. While Chelmsford would undoubtedly have found the routines of military administration comfortingly familiar, he was far less at home with the novel experience of an independent command in the field. Paradoxically, the relative ease of his ultimate success in the Ninth Frontier War (after an unpromising beginning) led directly to disaster in the Zululand campaign. He and his staff shared a perilous contempt for the military sophistication of the Zulu army, which was a product both of previous experience in the Eastern Cape and of an assured confidence in their decisive military edge based on their professional experience and on their ingrained sense of racial and class superiority. Thus, while Chelmsford was himself a captive of his aristocratic upbringing and its accompanying values, and of the culture of the army milieu in which he had spent his adult life, he shared his outlook and assumptions with his officers. Clery was surely right, therefore, when he reflected that Chelmsford had been singularly ‘unlucky’, for if the main Zulu army had gone against either of the two other columns invading Zululand in January 1879 instead of No. 3 Column, ‘the same thing would have happened to them’.148 Pearson or Wood, instead of Chelmsford, would have become the pilloried victim of the misplaced confidence that in early 1879 was initially common to all British officers in Zululand.
The only published biography of Chelmsford is Gerald French’s Lord Chelmsford and the Zulu War (London: John Lane at the Bodley Head, 1939), a sustained refutation of the condemnation of Chelmsford’s generalship in W H Clements’s pioneering, if anecdotal, study, The Glamour and Tragedy of the Zulu War (London: Bodley Head, 1936). Both works are in the partisan tradition of contemporary commentary with the aggressive and spiteful Daily News war correspondent Archibald Forbes (whom Chelmsford had alienated by refusing his request for the Zulu War medal) and Lieutenant Colonel Edward Durnford (the aggrieved brother of the officer on whom Chelmsford attempted to pin the blame for Isandlwana) ranged against the able and informed defence of Chelmsford’s generalship by Arthur Harness, who, as a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Artillery, had been away skirmishing with Chelmsford on the day of the battle. Recent years have seen the appearance of a number of annotated collections of contemporary letters, newspaper reports and diaries connected to the Anglo-Zulu War (though none has surpassed Frank Emery’s pioneering The Red Soldier (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1977) in verve or quality). Those that cast the most light on Chelmsford’s day-to-day conduct of the campaign are the Harness Letters in Sonia Clarke’s Invasion of Zululand 1879: Anglo-Zulu War Experiences of Arthur Harness; John Jervis, 4th Viscount St Vincent; and Sir Henry Bulwer (Houghton: Brenthurst Press, 1979) and the Alison Letters in her Zululand at War, 1879: The Conduct of the Anglo-Zulu War (Houghton: Brenthurst Press, 1984). The Alison Letters were solicited from various officers in the field by Major General Sir Archibald Alison, the DQMG for Intelligence at the War Office, in order to gain confidential and sensitive information on the conduct of the campaign. These letters are complemented by a selection from Chelmsford’s own military correspondence and private papers in John Laband’s Lord Chelmsford’s Zululand Campaign 1878–1879 (Stroud: Sutton Publishing for the Army Records Society, 1994).
As for the infamous battle of Isandlwana itself, conflicting interpretations continue to swirl about it. The starting point for any investigation is Major J S Rothwell of the Intelligence Branch of the War Office’s compilation of reports from the field into an official history called the Narrative of the Field Operations Connected with the Zulu War (London: HMSO, 1881). Chapter IV is devoted to the battle of Isandlwana and sticks firmly to Chelmsford’s view of events. The first modern critique of Isandlwana was Sir Reginald Coupland’s carefully measured Zulu Battle Piece: Isandhlwana (London: Collins, 1949). Then in 1965 David Jackson brought out a series of articles in the Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, in which he subjected the evidence to the most meticulous scrutiny. His revisionist interpretation has, as a consequence, become the orthodoxy followed by most subsequent historians. And these have not been lacking. Over two dozen books dealing wholly or in part with Isandlwana have been published since 1965. One of the most significant is R W F Drooglever’s close examination in The Road to Isandhlwana (London: Greenhill Books, 1992) of the part played by Colonel Durnford (the official scapegoat) in the Isandlwana debacle. Of the many accounts aimed at a more popular market the best by far have been by Ian Knight, including Zulu: Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift (London: Windrow & Greene, 1992), which compare favourably with more lightweight treatments that revert to sensationalist derring-do typical of Donald Morris’s classic The Washing of the Spears (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965). The most stimulating recent analysis of Isandlwana, Zulu Victory (London: Greenhill, 2002), is by Ron Lock and Peter Quantrill. Critics have been concerned by its questionable conclusions based upon unreliable evidence, but the book does have the merit of opening up debate afresh. Part Three that examines how the post-battle spin was managed is particularly revealing. The best short account available of the battle of Isandlwana, and one that presents a balanced synthesis of the various controversies that surround it, is Ian Beckett’s Isandlwana 1879 (London: Brassey’s/Chrysalis, 2003). Chelmsford’s role in the Isandlwana disaster is also analysed in the present author’s own research and fieldwork published in three works in particular: John Laband and Jeff Mathews, Isandlwana (Pietermaritzburg: Centaur, 1992); John Laband and Paul Thompson, The Illustrated Guide to the Anglo-Zulu War (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2000) and John Laband, Kingdom in Crisis: the Zulu Response to the British Invasion of 1879, 2nd edn (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2007).