It would be ‘easier than Matabeleland’, Rhodes assured him. That was all the encouragement Jameson needed. Doctor Jim was always ready for a challenge, and two years had passed since the expedition against Lobengula. It was time for a new venture, now with a touch of chivalry. Countrymen in danger: ‘Thousands of unarmed men, women and children of our race . . . at the mercy of well-armed Boers.’ That’s what was said in the letter he had been given by the conspirators in Johannesburg. He would fill in the date when the time came. The melodramatic appeal spurred his men to action. Four hundred mounted police from Rhodesia, a hundred volunteers from the Cape Colony and another hundred coloured auxiliaries; six Maxim machine guns, three pieces of artillery. It was not an impressive force, but, according to Jameson, big enough. The Boers’ so-called military prowess was ‘the biggest bubble of the century’. On the night of Sunday 29 December 1895 Jameson gave the sign to proceed. The raiders struck camp in Pitsani in Bechuanaland and crossed the border—heading for one of the biggest fiascos in colonial history.
The Jameson Raid was badly planned and poorly executed. It was the brainchild of Sir Henry Loch. An Uitlander uprising in Johannesburg, an invading force coming to their aid, and the high commissioner, acting as mediator, to manoeuvre the Transvaal towards a general election in which the Uitlanders could vote. Exit Kruger. Rhodes developed the plan in the summer of 1895. His business partner Alfred Beit donated funds, Sir Hercules Robinson consented with quaking knees and Chamberlain obtained exactly the right amount of information to officially know nothing about it. The Times agreed to launch a propaganda campaign. The British South Africa Company was assigned a strip of land near the border in Bechuanaland to station a police force, which was passed off as security guards for the railway construction site. The uprising in Johannesburg would be organised by Charles Leonard, chairman of the Transvaal National Union, Lionel Phillips, Hermann Eckstein’s successor as president of the Chamber of Mines, the American engineer John Hays Hammond, the mine owner George Farrar and Rhodes’s brother Frank, a former cavalry officer. Weapons were smuggled into the city and hidden in the gold mines.
The plan had two flaws. The first was the assumption that everyone involved had the same goal in mind, which wasn’t the case. The second was that an Uitlander uprising was bound to occur sooner or later. But things turned out differently.
Rhodes still had his vision of a single South African federation ultimately under British rule. But Chamberlain would settle for nothing less than the establishment of direct imperial control. And Johannesburg wasn’t the mutinous tinderbox that Rhodes and Jameson had thought it to be. There was a certain amount of dissatisfaction in the city, but no revolutionary fire flared up in the streets. According to the journalist Francis Younghusband, the people of Johannesburg weren’t the type. Their only concern, he said, was to make money. This was certainly true of some of the Randlords. J.B. Robinson, Barney Barnato and others, mainly of German extraction, were firmly on Kruger’s side. In the course of December 1895 even the conspirators were clawing their way back. They fell out with Rhodes over the flag, which was supposed to suggest something revolutionary, but they insisted on the Transvaal Vierkleur. They wanted reforms, nothing more. No British flag over Johannesburg, Hammond proclaimed in public.
At the end of December they informed Rhodes that ‘the polo tournament’—the code name for the uprising—would have to be postponed. At the same time Rhodes received a telegram from London urging him to act without delay. The British government was going to have its hands full with a confrontation with the United States—a border conflict between British Guiana and Venezuela had escalated. Chamberlain thought it best to go ahead right away; otherwise they would have to postpone everything for at least two years. Another factor was that a journalist from The Times, Flora Shaw, had heard that the Transvaal secretary of state, Willem Leyds, was in London, on his way to Berlin. She was an admirer of Rhodes, fully aware of the plot, and she decided to interview Leyds. The meeting confirmed her suspicions. There was nothing at all the matter with Leyds. It was just a bit too obvious, the way he was sucking those throat lozenges. She had figured him out. He was on his way to the Continent to conduct an ‘anti-Rhodes’ campaign. His throat complaint was a ‘diplomatic illness’. All the more reason to get moving.94
No one could accuse Cecil Rhodes of being indecisive, but this time he was at a loss to know how to handle the conflicting messages from London and Johannesburg. All he could come up with were a few half-hearted telegrams, which left Jameson enough scope to take the decision himself—as he did with reckless abandon. He had rustled up only 500 of the 1500 armed troops they had planned, but Doctor Jim wasn’t the kind to let anything stand in his way. Hadn’t he once bragged, ‘I could drive them out of the Transvaal with five hundred men armed with sjamboks’?
Four days later it was clear who was wielding the whip. Kruger had known about the raid by 30 December. Jameson’s men had cut the telegraph lines, but not those to Pretoria. Hundreds of Boers were armed and ready within a few hours. The uprising in Johannesburg didn’t materialise. The Boer commandants were able to focus their attention on the invaders. On New Year’s Day 1896 they drove them back—in Krugersdorp, appropriately enough. A day later the raiders surrendered at Doornkop. Jameson’s ‘rescue mission’ landed him in a Pretoria jail.95
Leyds sighed with relief. The good news had reached Berlin that same day. He could stop worrying about his wife and children. He was still having trouble with his telegrams, but he knew from other sources ‘that Pretoria (which is probably where you are) has not been affected, that the British troops have been defeated and Jameson, White and Willoughby are in jail in Pretoria’.
As he was already in Berlin, he might be able to make himself useful. Not that Flora Shaw was right. Leyds had really come to Europe to save his voice. But Dr Fränkel’s treatment was working and this was a political windfall. Rhodes and Jameson had done the Boer republic a favour. ‘The entire continent is on our side,’ Leyds remarked. He would be a fool not to take advantage of it. ‘The whole of Germany is over the moon, rich and poor, powerful and lowly. The papers are full of it.’ It gave him new energy. ‘I’m doing all I can to turn the whole of Europe against Britain. I’m working like a dog . . . Yesterday I went to the Chancellor. The day before, the Duke of Mecklenburg came round to the hotel to congratulate me. And so forth.’
For its part, the German government took advantage of Leyds’s presence. The foreign minister, Marshall von Bieberstein, asked Leyds ‘whether we would be able to do it alone and get the better of Jameson without help from outside’. Leyds’s affirmative reply resulted in the congratulatory telegram that Kaiser Wilhelm sent Kruger on 3 January 1896. The telegram was only one in a recent exchange of cordialities between the two heads of state. It caused a diplomatic stir because of the remark that the Boers had succeeded in repelling the attack ‘without requesting assistance from friendly powers’. Three days later Leyds was received in audience. In response to his thanks for the emperor’s unequivocal support, he was assured that ‘if things had gone differently, he would have ordered troops from the German frigate, which was in L.M. [Lourenço Marques] at the time, to “boot” Jameson out of the Transvaal’.His militant language was infectious. Leyds advised Pretoria not to be lenient towards the insurgents. ‘You have the sympathy and support of governments as well as the public, as long as you stand firm . . . At least one of the prisoners’ heads must roll.’96
Besides political backing, the Boers also had the approval of the business world in Germany. Leyds was particularly pleased with the spontaneous support of an old acquaintance. ‘The most committed of them all is Lippert. He and his wife have come specially from Hamburg and they’re staying here in the same hotel.’ All the trouble Leyds had been through with Lippert over dynamite and railway issues in recent years was forgotten. ‘It’s truly from the heart. It’s a matter of sentiment, not a calculated move.’ They had a lot to talk about. A Franco-German telegraph link with southern Africa to break the British monopoly. Their own mail service to Europe. And, of course, reinforcements for the Transvaal’s defences. The Boers needed modern weapons to defend themselves against any future attack. Lippert was the right person for that. He dealt in all kinds of explosives and had useful connections in the arms industry.97
Leyds left Germany in mid-February 1896 feeling satisfied. His throat had been treated successfully—it cost him 1000 marks in the end—he had received diplomatic support at the highest level and established business connections that might come in useful. The only disappointment was that he hadn’t managed to find support for the international conference he had proposed. Germany and Russia seemed to be in favour, but the Executive Council hadn’t backed him. Joubert and Chief Justice Kotzé thought it too risky, and Kruger was reluctant to force the issue. Leyds regretted ‘that Pretoria did not give me a free hand. The Great Powers were ready to guarantee the independence and neutrality of the Republic along the same lines as Belgium and Switzerland.’98
On the positive side, there was the immense personal gratification of meeting with Otto von Bismarck, 80 years old and leading a quiet life on his estate, Friedrichsruhe. ‘It was an interesting day for me, one of the highlights of my life,’ he wrote to Louise. ‘My first impression was very old. But he perked up as we went on, over breakfast and especially after a few glasses of champagne.’ And once he did, there was no stopping him. Leyds was surprised by the unusually high pitch of his voice, and by his lack of reserve. The empress and her ladies-in-waiting and German colonial politics were the main targets of his sharp tongue, but the British bore the real brunt of it. You couldn’t trust them further than you could throw them, the former chancellor warned. One could get along with an Englishman socially, but as soon as they went into politics they hung their conscience next to their umbrella on the coat rack. That was an intriguing characterisation from the architect of realpolitik. Leyds must have been mindful of it when he stopped off in London on his way home to pay a brief courtesy call on Joe Chamberlain.99
At the end of March 1896 Leyds was back in Pretoria. His wife and children were fine, apart from Louise’s and Louis’s usual health problems. All was well with the president too. He had kept his nerve during the raid and a sense of proportion afterwards. Though many Boers were clamouring for revenge, against the raiders, against the conspirators, against the whole of Johannesburg, Kruger relied on his shrewd political judgment. Strategic generosity was what was needed, he explained to the other Boer leaders. Extradite Jameson and his men to Britain and let them stand trial there, before the eyes of a sceptical world. He managed to persuade them, as he did about the best way to deal with the conspirators in Johannesburg.
At the beginning of the raid the conspirators had set up a Reform Committee with scores of others, in the hope of still achieving something by political means. Once again, this turned out to be a mistake. Virtually all of them were arrested and tried. One or two, such as Leonard, got away. The saddlebags belonging to Jameson and his raiders contained more than enough incriminating evidence to hang them: telegrams, codebooks and a copy of the dramatic letter. Five of the conspirators—Phillips, Hammond, Farrar, Frank Rhodes and the secretary of the Reform Committee, Percy FitzPatrick—were sentenced to death. Others received prison sentences and fines. The death sentences sparked off a heated debate in the Executive Council. Kruger argued in favour of making a grand gesture—good for public relations—towards the condemned men. Leyds, who had meanwhile joined in the discussion, was categorically against any remission. Just for once, he found his fiercest opponent, General Joubert, on his side. Kruger pushed the compromise through in stages. First, the death penalty was commuted to 15 years’ imprisonment and, after that, fines. All in all, the conspirators paid £200,000. They were reimbursed by Rhodes and Beit. The two super-rich financiers could easily afford it. In the end, the Jameson Raid cost them twice as much—each.100
It was an illuminating lesson in leadership from the 70-year-old Kruger. Relentless in battle, merciful in victory. Everyone took sides with Oom Paul. All the doubts about his judgment evaporated, the charges of nepotism and cronyism faded away. His boorishness became just one of those things. Only for a while, but the effect was startling. After the hearing, all the evidence was recorded in a Green Book, which identified Rhodes and Jameson as the main culprits and hinted at the complicity of the British government. The Boers were drawn together in resolute unanimity and a shared aversion to the British.
In shared adversity, too. In 1896, as if the devil had taken a hand, nature conspired against them as well: drought, locusts, famine and then rinderpest on top of it all. It looks like all the plagues of Egypt, Leyds wrote to the Duke of Mecklenburg in May. ‘It was the ancient Egyptians’ good fortune that there were no British in those days,’ he added. But the Boers remained stoical. Leyds could not have known at the time what devastation this first outbreak of African cattle plague would wreak. The epidemic wiped out about two and a half million head of cattle, an estimated 80 to 90 per cent of the entire herd in the southern African subcontinent. Sheep, pigs and goats were also susceptible to the virus, as were gnu, kudu and antelope in the wild. The unmitigated suffering of the cattle farmers, black and white, was heartbreaking. The epidemic also had a calamitous impact on society as a whole. In spite of the new railway, the oxwagon was then still by far the most common form of transport.101
The one glimmer of light—in poignant contrast—was the flourishing state of the Republic’s finances. As if to widen the chasm between the pastoral and industrial worlds that coexisted in the Transvaal, business was booming on the Rand in 1896. No rinderpest tragedy, not so much as a scar after the botched coup d’état. Just fortunes being made from gold. The railway company and the Transvaal’s treasury were reaping huge profits. The railway company’s turnover soared from 20 to 36 million guilders and its profit from 4.5 to 10.5 million. This was thanks to the insatiable demand for coal and the flow of goods that came via the eastern and south-eastern lines, not instead of but as well as the southern line. By contract 85 per cent, nearly 9 million guilders of the 10.5 million guilders’ worth of profit went straight to the state. As a result, the Transvaal government’s revenue that year came to an unprecedented £3.9 million, or 47 million guilders.
Politicians and government employees benefited personally as well. Salaries in the civil service rose significantly. Leyds’s annual income, for instance—after an increase from £1200 to £1650 in 1889—went up to £2300 in one go.102
Forty-seven million Dutch guilders. That was an immense sum of money, equal to 80 million German marks or 100 million French francs. In Germany and France one could buy a whole lot of rifles and cannons for that. And that is exactly what the Transvaal government did. At the time of the Jameson Raid it transpired that many of the civilians who were called up for military service did not possess suitable weapons. Commandant-General Joubert had rushed off to order batches of rifles wherever he could find them. But these would not be enough for the inevitable ‘next time’. The Executive Council decided that, as a precaution, every ablebodied man should be equipped with a modern firearm at government expense. Huge supplies of rifles and ammunition were brought in within a few months; even duplicates. Money wasn’t a problem. First, 30,000 Martini-Henry rifles, because Joubert was accustomed to them. Then 37,000 Mausers and 20 million cartridges, when tests showed they were actually superior. Light, solid, easy to handle, suitable for rapid fire, good short-range performance, small lightweight bullets, smokeless powder: modern and state-of-the-art. A few years later this last feature proved its worth many times over.
Fortifications were built or reinforced in strategic places and the artillery was brought up to standard. Before the Jameson Raid the arsenal consisted of fewer than 20 guns. A series of orders in Germany and France—Krupp and Creusot cannon of various calibres—brought the total to 80. Plus 34 Maxim machine guns. All supplied with ample ammunition. Hardware would not be the problem next time around.103
There was still the threat from within. The Executive Council wanted better protection on that side too. This meant tougher legislation and more police control. A new Press Act was introduced to start with. For years, Kruger and Leyds had battled with opposition newspapers such as Land en Volk and The Star. The new law banned the publication of anonymous contributions or articles that were deemed either morally offensive, a threat to peace and stability, libellous, or likely to incite violence. And it was the president alone who decided. Another two new pieces of legislation, the Aliens Act and the Extradition Act, widened the government’s powers to bar or deport undesirable immigrants. The Boers dug in and sharpened their claws.
At least, as far as the British were concerned. All Afrikanerdom was outraged over the raid and came to the rescue. In the February 1896 presidential elections in the Orange Free State, the Afrikaner candidate, Marthinus Steyn, won with an overwhelming majority from the opposition, which stood for closer affiliation with the Cape Colony. Steyn was a lawyer educated in Leiden and London. In theory he had a choice between two directions. In practice he made no secret of his solidarity with the Transvaal Boers. The contract with the Cape railway was cancelled, and the railway service in the Free State came under his administration. The Volksraad in Bloemfontein promised military aid if the need arose. The Volksraad in Pretoria made this reciprocal. In March 1897 the closer ties between the two Boer republics were consolidated by a political alliance. It was a welcome boost and brought with it significantly more firepower. The Orange Free State possessed another 12,000 Martini-Henrys, 12,000 Mausers, 24 cannon and three machine guns.104
The shock was just as great in the Cape Colony. Jan Hofmeyr and his Afrikaner Bond felt betrayed and withdrew their support for Rhodes. He had made his position impossible and should resign as prime minister. The Cape parliament subsequently published a Blue Book, which came to basically the same conclusion as the Transvaal’s Green Book: the Colossus had ‘directed and controlled the combination’.
That wasn’t all. Rhodes also had reason to fear for the future of the country named after him. Chamberlain was concerned about his own political career and threatened to cancel the charter of the British South Africa Company. Rhodes saw blackmail as the only way out. He had enough telegrams from Chamberlain to prove that he had prior knowledge of the raid. He also had a good lawyer, who discreetly conveyed the message. That took care of the BSAC’s future—and Chamberlain’s at the same time.105
But not Rhodesia’s, not yet. Jameson had taken most of Rhodesia’s police troops for his raid on the Transvaal. After their defeat and imprisonment, the whole of that huge territory had to make do with only 60 white policemen. Independently of each other, the Ndebele and the Shona arrived at the same conclusion. The BSAC’s pioneers had driven them from their land, stolen most of their cattle and condemned them to hard labour. And Rhodesia, like the Transvaal, was plagued by drought, locusts and rinderpest. This was their chance. They hadn’t handed in their weapons, but had hidden them away. They rose up, both using the same means—attacking remote farms, trading posts and settlements and killing or wounding a total of 500 people, roughly ten per cent of the white population.
Their tactics horrified the survivors, but probably saved their colony. Massive, direct attacks on the virtually undefended administrative centres of Bulawayo and Fort Salisbury would have done far more harm. As things were, the BSAC had time to bring in auxiliaries from the Cape Colony and Natal. Rhodes led the campaign. It was one endless retaliation. ‘You should kill all you can, as it serves as a lesson to them when they talk things over at their fires at night.’ His instructions were carried out to the letter. Thousands of Ndebele and Shona were wiped out: ten thousand, according to some estimates. Olive Schreiner wrote about the incident in Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, an indictment of the ruthless and indiscriminate colonial war. She had once believed in Rhodes; this was her revenge. In 1897 order was restored in white Rhodesia.106
The Jameson Raid sent ripples through Europe as well, but the response was less clear cut than in southern Africa. The initial response was unequivocal, in political circles and among the public. Fury at the violation of the Transvaal’s autonomy, relief at the Boers’ successful resistance, sniggers over the botched raid. That was the general attitude on the European continent. It was felt most keenly by Britain’s fiercest rivals, Germany and France, and by the Netherlands, with its blood ties to the Boers.
In Britain things were more complicated. There was indignation there too, especially over the mining magnates and their cynical power games. The raid lent credence to the nascent hypothesis of a critical observer, John Hobson. In Imperialism (1902) he would argue that imperialism was driven by the City of London and its international offshoots. Not everyone went as far as Hobson, but many felt uncomfortable about the situation. It wasn’t right. At the same time, however, it was hard to suppress a glow of national pride. At least those men had guts. Doctor Jim actually did something. The ‘rescue letter’ inspired the poet laureate Alfred Austin to write about ‘girls in the gold-reef city, there are mothers and children too . . . So what can a brave man do?’ No wonder the raiders had heeded the call.107
The British public’s ambivalence vanished in a puff of smoke after Kaiser Wilhelm’s telegram to Kruger. His forthright promise of military support for the Transvaal was a flagrant insult, a sign of German aggression. All their outrage was now directed at Berlin. ‘It is considered very unfriendly towards this country,’ Queen Victoria told her grandson. The serious newspapers endorsed her view, the popular press screamed it out. Germans were harassed in London’s docks, in shops and in bars. In music halls, actors dressed up as Jameson’s ‘troopers’ sang ominously, ‘We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do, we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too.’
It therefore isn’t surprising that the raiders received relatively mild sentences in June 1896. The main suspects, Jameson and his second-incharge, Willoughby, got 15 months’ imprisonment. Jameson didn’t even complete his sentence. He became ill, was granted a remission and then was released before the end of the year.
Chamberlain got off scot-free. A parliamentary investigation in which he was questioned, along with the others who were directly involved—Rhodes, Beit, Jameson, Phillips and Leonard—ended with nothing more than a cunningly worded statement. The incriminating telegrams weren’t submitted to the commission. But they were submitted to Lord Salisbury, along with Chamberlain’s resignation. However, the prime minister wasn’t prepared to lose his most popular minister. He refused his resignation and became complicit in the cover-up, including the deal with Rhodes. The investigating commission concluded that Chamberlain and his staff were above reproach. Salisbury’s Liberal predecessor, Lord Rosebery, took a different view: ‘I have never read a document at once so shameful and so absurd.’108
Be that as it may, as from July 1896 Chamberlain had a free hand as regards the Transvaal. Rhodes had tried, unsuccessfully, to achieve his aims by force. Chamberlain opted for the patient diplomatic art of pulling and prodding, running the show not via Cape Town but directly from London. His opening move was to extend an invitation to President Kruger. A personal meeting in the English capital might help to restore their trust, he suggested. They could discuss matters like the Transvaal’s security and South Africa’s economic development. That would be fine, Pretoria replied, but they would also discuss replacing the London Convention with a new agreement, minus article 4. That wasn’t exactly what Chamberlain had in mind. But he’d be happy to talk about the Uitlanders’ grievances. This diplomatic sparring went on for a couple of months. Kruger said more or less nothing; Leyds rendered it in watertight legal terms.
It didn’t make them any more popular in Whitehall. In an internal memorandum Chamberlain described Kruger as ‘an ignorant, dirty, cunning and obstinate man who has known how to feather his own nest and to enrich all his family and dependants’. Leyds he didn’t trust at all, with his so-called health problems and his intrigues in Berlin. He wasn’t the only one in London who didn’t trust him. When Lippert visited the City in June 1896 he encountered less animosity towards the Germans than towards ‘Dr Leyds’. According to his business associates, Leyds was known in London as ‘the snake in the grass’. So strong was the feeling against him that a banker friend confided in Lippert, ‘Give us up Dr Leyds, and we will give up Rhodes.’109
If Leyds had been given a say in the matter, his critics would have had their way. His ailment returned with a vengeance in the South African winter of 1896. In the middle of August he turned to Moltzer in despair. ‘I’m worried about the future, mainly because of my throat condition.’ He had been optimistic after his treatment in Berlin, but now he was sure that ‘if I continue to live in this environment and with the assistance available to me here, I will lose my voice permanently. You can imagine what that would mean to me, I, who have no independent means.’ His wife and son weren’t in the best of health either. ‘Louise cannot spend another summer here. The heat gives her headaches; they must not recur.’ And Louis couldn’t bear ‘either the heat or the winter months. He is ill every June and July; you know those months are bad for the health here. This year he had bronchitis first and after that a typhus-like fever.’
Leyds saw only one solution. It was time to leave Africa and return to Europe. Moltzer was in a position to help him. During his last visit they had discussed the inadequacies of the Transvaal’s diplomatic representation to the Great Powers. Beelaerts van Blokland did the best he could to act on the Transvaal’s behalf, but because of his parliamentary obligations it was always from The Hague. There really should be embassies in Berlin, Paris, London and Lisbon. Leyds would be the right man for the job. He had countered by saying, ‘I can’t leave the Boers in the lurch’, but now, realising ‘that my health will put me out of action’, this argument was no longer valid. ‘It is imperative that I look after myself; I can’t sacrifice my voice for my work.’ He asked his ‘best friend’ Moltzer to write to Kruger, adding, ‘it would be good to point out—without mentioning a figure—that representatives of the Republic must be paid well because, as is customary all over the world, there are expenses they cannot avoid incurring’.
Moltzer didn’t waste time. Within a few weeks he wrote a long, carefully worded letter to Kruger, saying exactly what Leyds had asked him to. He also gave it a personal touch to drive the message home. ‘I myself had to give up my position last year as Professor at the University of Amsterdam, as a result of a voice and throat complaint, and unfortunately I know from experience how debilitating excessive strain on the vocal chords can be. But, with sincere gratitude, I can also tell you from experience about the wonderful kindness shown to me when the Government of my country—alerted by a faithful friend of mine—prevented my health from being destroyed prematurely by entrusting me with the senior position I hold now.’110
It was perfectly clear. The Transvaal needed good diplomatic representatives to promote its interests. In his present position Leyds was in danger of working himself to a standstill. He could, however, use his talents to serve the Boer cause as an envoy to Europe.
Kruger wasn’t overjoyed. He didn’t want to lose his trusted state secretary. He would think it over. In the meantime Willem and Louise Leyds took one decision at least: their children, now nine and seven years old, were going back to the Netherlands. Louise went with them to settle them in and make arrangement for their schooling. At Christmas she gave a farewell party. At the beginning of January 1897 Willem saw his wife and children off in Lourenço Marques.
It was hard on Leyds. To make matters worse, he was having a difficult time at work. Chief Justice Kotzé raised a fundamental question in connection with a court case concerning mining rights: who had the last word when it came to legislation in the Transvaal? Up to then it had been the Volksraad, but now Kotzé wanted to give the Supreme Court the right to veto all new legislation to ensure that it was constitutional. His proposal led to an out-and-out power struggle between the political and judicial authorities. This crisis at the heart of the South African Republic affected more than just Leyds’s work. It disturbed him on a personal level as well. The other four Supreme Court judges backed Kotzé. Even ‘Ameshoff, who owes his position to me, has dealt the State a blow which . . . is nothing short of criminal’. Because that’s what upset Leyds the most. He felt that Kotzé and his henchmen were jeopardising the entire judicial system purely to further their own political ambitions and out of ‘personal vanity’. And just when the Transvaal was in trouble. ‘Merely raising this matter is a triumph for the British,’ he remarked bitterly. It suggests ‘that we need reforms to guarantee legal certainty for persons and property’.
In response, the politicians proposed legislation whereby decisions taken by the Volksraad would be binding on ‘every court of law’. In a decisive meeting Leyds delivered an uncharacteristically long speech, advocating the primacy of the Volksraad. The motion was passed. The president was authorised to dismiss members of the judiciary who were not prepared to abide by the decision.
It didn’t come to that, at least not at that stage, but for Leyds it was the last straw. ‘I have more or less decided not to continue as State Sec.,’ he noted in mid-February 1897, in the diary he kept for his wife. He agreed on a scenario with Kruger. If he was re-elected at the end of May, he would ‘leave for Europe immediately afterwards, for health reasons’. The president would then try to arrange the matter of diplomatic representation with the Volksraad ‘and discuss it with Beelaerts, because we mustn’t go over his head’. To be on the safe side he proposed an alternative scenario, in the strictest confidence, to Middelberg, director of the Netherlands-South African Railway Company, who agreed to consider appointing Leyds ‘as adviser, for something in the region of £1000’. So once Leyds returned to Europe he would have two options. ‘What I do’, he wrote to Louise in his diary, ‘depends on many different factors: money, position as commissioner, railway company, etc., you etc.’111