‘And the President’s foul temper on top of it all.’ Leyds was distraught. ‘It’s sad to see what old age is doing to him. He’s losing his integrity.’ He had been unable to write about it ‘for several hours... I was trembling from suppressed indignation and rage.’ Kruger ‘has no compunction about telling stupid, barefaced lies. It doesn’t trouble him in the least, as long as he gets what he wants.’
The president and the state secretary had clashed in the past, but this time there were no holds barred. Leyds was badly shaken, even a day later when he wrote to Louise. The row was sparked off by the most recent of a series of slanderous newspaper articles. Leyds was accustomed to insults and slurs, particularly from a sleazy opposition paper like Land en Volk. Now they had raked up the old canard about him being an atheist. Leyds had just shrugged it off, but Kruger insisted on having an official denial from Leyds published in the paper. Otherwise, he added, the Volksraad might be difficult about Leyds’s diplomatic appointment.
Normally he could control his feelings, but this time Leyds exploded. Did the president think he was going to Europe for his own pleasure? If the Volksraad didn’t trust him after all those years he had dedicated to the Boer cause, they would just have to vote against him. In any event, he refused to write anything for ‘a malicious rag like Land en Volk ... which would twist things or hush them up and then trot them out again later, whether I deny them or not’. Kruger wouldn’t budge. The end of the story was that he got someone else to write the denial.134
Leyds’s anger gradually subsided, but he still had trouble dealing with Kruger. Oom Paul to his people, a tyrant to everyone around him. Kruger had never been the most civil of men and he became more difficult with age. But he was the undisputed leader of the Boers, after all, especially after the Jameson Raid. In early February 1898, at the age of 72, he was re-elected as president for the fourth time. The results said it all: almost 13,000 votes, more than twice as many as his rivals Schalk Burger and the ‘eternal loser’ Joubert put together.
Reassured by his support from the Boer population, Kruger continued on the same political course. Chief Judge Kotzé lost his job and no more concessions went to the Rand barons or Uitlanders. Burger had been more sympathetic to their demands. He was chairman of the industrial commission made up of government officials and members of the Chamber of Mines. The commission had been looking into the needs of the mining industry since April 1897, and three months later made far-reaching recommendations to the Transvaal government: break the dynamite monopoly, lower the prices of coal and dynamite, nationalise the Netherlands-South African Railway Company and facilitate the recruitment of cheap black labour.
After Leyds’s return from Europe early in September 1897, the Volksraad debated the industrial commission’s report. Ending the dynamite monopoly was too big a step for Kruger, but he was willing to adopt some of the other recommendations, at least to some extent. The price of dynamite went down, as did several of the railway company tariffs, the latter to the tune of £200,000 a year. He saw no benefit in nationalising the company overnight. It would cost an estimated £7 or £8 million and the government lacked the resources to run an enterprise of that magnitude. At Leyds’s suggestion it was decided to take over the company in stages by buying up shares until the company automatically became a state enterprise. The government also helped to expand the labour reserve for the mining industry. In October 1897, Leyds signed an agreement with the Portuguese governor, allowing the recruitment of labour from Mozambique.135
It was more than nothing, but less than the industrial commission had recommended. The opposition wasn’t happy, but as far as Leyds was concerned, they could take it or leave it. After Kruger’s re-election he was mainly preoccupied with two issues: a suitable response to Chamberlain’s suzerainty claim, and preparations for his posting overseas.
Chamberlain didn’t stop at his address to the House of Commons. More than two months later, on 16 October 1897, he had repeated Britain’s claim to suzerainty in a letter to the Transvaal government. Leyds had been brooding over a response ever since. At the end of March 1898, he was ready. He wrote about it to Louise, who had gone ahead to their children in the Netherlands. He had made ‘a wonderful discovery in some old documents’, he announced proudly, which would ‘trash’ Chamberlain’s case. He was meticulous about the wording. The drafts he received from his assistants were never good enough. ‘I want this dispatch to reveal, here and there, my own thoughts and hand.’136
It did. The letter he sent to Chamberlain on 16 April 1898 on behalf of the Transvaal government opened with a detailed account of the events leading up to the signing of the London Convention. Unlike the preceding Pretoria Convention (1881), the London document did not contain the word ‘suzerain’. It had been removed deliberately, Leyds argued. That was apparent if one compared the texts and it was also clear from oral and written testimonies. The British signatory, Sir Hercules Robinson, then high commissioner and now known as Lord Rosmead, had conceded this explicitly in a newspaper interview. That was Leyds’s ‘wonderful discovery’. Since then, moreover, Great Britain and the South African Republic had exchanged consular representatives. That was only possible between independent states, and the same applied to the settlement of disputes by arbitration. The latter had once been invoked over a provision of the London Convention. The dispute concerned the ‘coolie question’, whether or not Asians from the British colonies enjoyed rights of residence, among other things the right to render services. The arbitrator—the Supreme Court of the Orange Free State—had ruled in favour of the Transvaal and the British government had respected its judgment. These were powerful arguments. Convinced that his case was airtight, Leyds sent copies of Chamberlain’s letter and his own reply to the governments of the Netherlands, Germany, France, Portugal, Switzerland and the United States.137
The final arrangements for Leyds’s appointment as diplomatic envoy were being made around the same time. After his experience in 1897, he had initially appealed for a larger diplomatic service, with agents in London, Paris, Berlin and Lisbon. Kruger and the rest of the Executive Council considered this too expensive. They would keep it to a single envoy, with offices in each of the four capital cities, plus The Hague and Brussels. The consulates there would remain open, as would the ones in London, Amsterdam and Frankfurt. All of this for a total of £15,000 a year, which included £4000 for the envoy’s salary. He would also get an allowance for business trips, six weeks’ annual leave and a trip to Pretoria for consultations once a year, or every two years. Leyds chose Brussels as his base. He preferred it to The Hague because he couldn’t stand all ‘that gossip, those snide remarks! About clothes, about everything.’138
Behind closed doors, the Executive Council approved Leyds’s appointment in April 1898. But there were still two small matters to resolve. Not only had the rumour about Leyds’s atheism continued to circulate, but fingers were being pointed at him for another reason as well. It was alleged that he had received £500 from the dynamite company: in short, a bribe. It was best for him and for the government as a whole to clear his name before he resigned as state secretary and started work as the country’s envoy. This time Leyds was prepared to issue a formal denial. He was charged with bribery and acquitted by the Supreme Court. He furnished the Executive Council with proof that he had been christened in Magelang, Java, and was a registered member of the Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk in Pretoria. On 20 May 1898, Willem Johannes Leyds was officially appointed special envoy and minister plenipotentiary of the South African Republic.139
Kruger’s re-election was bad news for Cape Town. Sir Alfred Milner, the new high commissioner, had seen enough of him. Another five years of Boer dictatorship and the Transvaal would be ruined for good. Worse than that, ‘the richest spot on earth’ would drag the rest of the southern African subcontinent down; it would drift away from the British Empire. It was already ‘the weakest link in the Imperial chain’. What had happened in America was imminent here. No dominion under the British flag, but an independent state. Not a Canada, but a United States of South Africa. What had become of Chamberlain’s Grand Scheme or their shared belief in the superiority of the British race? His conclusion was straightforward. ‘The waiting game’ didn’t work. Something had to change, for better or worse.
Absolute dedication to the British Empire: to that he owed his appointment as high commissioner in South Africa and governor of the Cape Colony. Alfred Milner was driven by a fanatical, almost zealous nationalism. Overcompensating for his German background, critics said. His grandmother was German, he had been born in Hesse and raised in Baden-Württemberg. But everything came together in Oxford. He got his education and found his vocation there: a knowledge of the classics, political acumen, social commitment and imperialist ideals. He was a brilliant student in all subjects. After a few years in journalism, as editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, Milner gained his first experience in colonial administration in Egypt. He spent three years there as minister of finance. At the end of his term he enumerated the blessings of British administration in England and Egypt. The book was an instant success. It established his reputation as a writer and administrator but, most of all, as an imperialist in heart and soul. Back in England Milner occupied a senior position at the ministry of finance. In 1894 he became a Companion of the Order of the Bath and in 1895 Knight Commander in the same order. This was appropriate for his new position. Sir Hercules was succeeded by Sir Alfred. He arrived in Cape Town in May 1897.
Milner allowed himself time to grow accustomed to his role. Not that he was patient—on the contrary—but these were Chamberlain’s orders. The Jameson Raid had stirred up a lot of bad blood among the Afrikaners in the Cape Colony. Milner had to avoid acting in haste, like Rhodes. ‘Wait and see’ was his watchword for the time being, and hope that the internal opposition to Kruger would gather momentum. In the meantime he travelled in order to get to know the country and its people and to decide on the best way to proceed.
After Kruger’s re-election he was ready. In a personal letter he sent Chamberlain in late February 1898, Milner proposed giving Kruger two options: either reforms in the Transvaal or war. With the old tyrant at the helm in Pretoria, reform was not going to happen. The Boers quarrelled among themselves, but over jobs and contracts, not political issues. There was nothing to do but prepare for a crisis: step up the pressure systematically and not be distracted by details. During the drifts crisis of 1895 they had found that threats of violence yielded results. Kruger had considered backing down and making concessions. The same would happen this time as well. If not, then war. It couldn’t last long and there was no doubt the British would win.140
It meant that everyone on the British side would have to close ranks. Henry Binns, the governor of Natal, found himself in trouble for sending Kruger a congratulatory telegram after his re-election. How could he? The point now was to separate the wheat from the chaff. It wasn’t so much between ‘the English and the Dutch’ as between supporters and opponents of the despotic regime in Pretoria. It was time for everyone living in the Cape Colony and Natal to take sides ‘as loyal citizens of a free British Community’.
The message was clear, and Milner emphasised it in public three weeks later. On 3 March 1898 he delivered a speech in Graaff-Reinet, a town about 600 kilometres north-east of Cape Town, at the opening of a new railway line. His audience comprised mainly Afrikaners and he addressed himself to them, in terms that left nothing to the imagination. They were living in the Cape Colony, in peace and prosperity, enjoying all the fruits of British colonial rule: freedom, justice, equality and selfgovernment. Those were precisely the conditions that did not exist in the South African Republic. In spite of that, there were many Cape Afrikaners who sympathised with their clansmen in the Transvaal. Sympathy he could understand. But anyone who put the independence of the Boer republic above the honour and interests of their own country, no. In Milner’s view, they were betraying their own flag. If they truly wanted a peaceful solution for the whole of South Africa, they should try to influence Pretoria to introduce reforms, to make the Transvaal government more open to change.141
Milner’s words were not subtle. Everyone, friend and foe, knew what he was driving at. He had spent almost a year checking out the lie of the land. Now he took a position. He was forcing every white South African to make a choice: for or against the enlightened British regime, for or against Kruger’s dictatorship. Those were the only options.
Milner’s Graaff-Reinet speech had the effect of polarising the two parties, and the situation worsened a few days later when a familiar face reappeared on the scene. An interview in the Cape Times and a public appearance at the Good Hope Hall on 12 March 1898 removed any doubt. Cecil Rhodes was back in town. The Jameson Raid and the uprisings in Rhodesia had dulled the Colossus’s sheen, but he hadn’t fallen from his pedestal. Elections for the Cape parliament were due in September 1898, and he was aiming for the premiership again. His political programme was still basically the same, and so was his campaign strategy. He still had enough money to buy supporters and pay off his adversaries. He still had his vision of a federation of the whole of southern Africa, united under the Union Jack. Except that this time he was targeting a different group of voters. The Jameson Raid had severed his ties with Jan Hofmeyr and his Afrikaner Bond. Rhodes had traded them in for a more natural ally, the South African League. Founded in May 1896, it was the new hub for British nationalists in South Africa. Besides the Cape Colony and Natal, it also had a branch in the Transvaal. In the motherland it was called the South African Association.
So Rhodes was back in the political arena, this time openly as the champion of ‘jingoism’. It was also Rhodes who coined the memorable slogan ‘Equal rights for every civilised man south of the Zambezi’. It must have raised his opponents’ hackles. It wasn’t just money he flung around, but also old-fashioned mud. His election campaign was dirty and a cliff-hanger all the way through. The result came as a surprise. Rhodes didn’t win. By a small margin the victory went to the South Africa Party, led by William Schreiner. With the support of the Afrikaner Bond, Schreiner became the new prime minister.
Politically, he was a moderate. Like his sister Olive, the writer, Schreiner had once been an admirer of Rhodes, but the Jameson Raid was the breaking point for him too. He considered himself a loyal subject of Queen Victoria, but at the same time an advocate of the Boer republics’ right to decide their own future. That wasn’t what Milner and Rhodes wanted to hear. They would have to find a way to deal with him.142
Leyds’s transfer from the backwaters of Boer society to the rarefied world of diplomacy was a big step in his life. On the one hand it was a relief. Coming from a respectable, bourgeois background, he was offended by the lack of refinement and decorum in the Transvaal. He had never grown accustomed to it and never wanted to. A sense of proportion and respect for authority were hard to find in Pretoria. The Boer cause had become important to him, but the Boers themselves were a different matter. For 14 years he had lived among them, shared their hopes and their fears, but never had he become one of them. As dedicated as he was, he remained an outsider.
Leyds was a vain man, proud of his accomplishments and privileges. He enjoyed wearing his decorations at the opening of the Volksraad and on other official occasions. As state attorney he had received a Portuguese knighthood and, as state secretary, honours from the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and France. Land en Volk called him ‘the man with the medals’. Like any diplomat, he wore a uniform, somewhat ‘festooned with gilt’ by his predecessor, Beelaerts van Blokland. But then this wasn’t inappropriate for an envoy of the world’s biggest producer of gold.143
There was also a downside to his life as a diplomat. In the nineteenth century, the diplomatic corps was a bastion of aristocracy and old money. Men of lowlier birth weren’t welcomed with open arms. Even worse, he represented a nouveau riche on the international scene, an insignificant Boer republic which, on top of it, was at loggerheads with the most powerful nation on earth. All in all, he was not well placed to make his entrée into the courts of Europe. He was an outsider there, too. The difference was that this time he actually wanted to belong.
But it wasn’t that easy. It took half a year to present his credentials. Leyds put it down to ‘fate’, which wasn’t ‘kind to me’. But it had at least as much to do with diplomatic sensitivities in the various capitals. He realised this when he first presented his credentials in Paris. He was received by President Faure at the Elysée Palace on 8 July 1898. Diplomatic protocol was observed, including his arrival in a coach with a guard of honour of cuirassiers. But when he subsequently paid his courtesy calls on other diplomats in Paris, the British closed the door in his face. On Lord Salisbury’s instructions, the ambassador, Sir Edward Monson, avoided an official meeting with him.
This was a taste of what Leyds could expect all over the Continent. London did not officially challenge his accreditation, but British diplomats were advised to avoid formal contact with him. This unofficial boycott affected the way other governments treated him, the Netherlands less than some others. In early August, Queen Regent Emma and young Princess Wilhelmina, the future queen, received him at Soestdijk Palace, observing the rules of diplomatic etiquette. But elsewhere the atmosphere was strained. Kaiser Wilhelm II and King Leopold II of Belgium made a point of keeping him waiting. Also under British pressure, Tsar Nicholas of Russia decided not to invite the Transvaal—or the Orange Free State—to the International Peace Conference, which was held, at his initiative, in The Hague in 1899.144
Leyds had to do something about the journalists as well as the diplomats. He soon realised that ‘the mood in Europe, especially France, is hostile towards the Republic’. He knew who was behind it: Milner and Rhodes. They were far away, but their tentacles reached all the way to the French press. Through the South African Association in London they filled newspaper pages with half-truths about the Transvaal, outright lies about Kruger and fabrications about him. Le Figaro, La Liberté, Le Matin. All of them could be bought, for heaps of money; but that was no problem for the mining magnates from Kimberley and Johannesburg.
For Leyds it was a very serious problem. He wasn’t in a position to repay them in kind. It would cost thousands of pounds. ‘The Republic cannot afford to spend as much to defend itself as its enemies spend to attack it.’ But something had to be done ‘to tell people the truth’. A press office in Paris, to begin with. ‘The most reliable person and one I believe would be suitable for the job’ was the French journalist E. Roels. For £1000 a month, Roels collected cuttings from scores of newspapers—French, German, British, Portuguese and even Russian—and launched a pro-Boer campaign. The other side had a great deal more money, but it was for a good cause and that was also worth something. ‘It’s a contest between money and justice.’145
Justice for the Boer cause. That was still the ideal Leyds was pursuing. His goal remained unchanged, but the kind of life he was dedicating to it was totally different. It was refined, civilised, extrovert, with more variety and pageantry. And of course it gave more opportunity to travel. As envoy-at-large, he was constantly on the move, visiting one capital after another. Towards the end of the year, he began to suffer from ‘the fatigue caused by excessive travel and work. The distances here in Europe are considerable too.’
But there was more to come. He still had to present his credentials in Lisbon and St Petersburg. In late November 1898 he travelled to Lisbon, where he was received first by King Carlos, subsequently in another palace by Queen Amélie, and finally by the queen mother, Maria Pia, who lived in Cascais. The train journey to Cascais was an experience he would never forget. To enjoy the view he went to sit outdoors on the balcony of the lounge car, where his eyes were suddenly ‘filled with grit’. He attended the audience regardless—with tears streaming down his cheeks—but back in Lisbon he needed ‘two surgical interventions to relieve me of my load of coal’. Blinded by coal soot on a train journey. Land en Volk would have relished the symbolism.
He never made it to St Petersburg. He hadn’t been keen to go in the first place. ‘It must be bitterly cold in Russia,’ he wrote to Pretoria on 16 December 1898. ‘I’m not looking forward to the journey for that reason, and I hope I get through it all right as far as my health is concerned.’ To be on the safe side he went to see his doctor anyway. That put an end to the trip. He was ‘absolutely’ forbidden to go to St Petersburg. The old complaints had come back. ‘My nose and throat... need immediate attention, daily.’ He had been told off for ‘not coming sooner. But how could I? I rush from city to city and when I get there I hardly have time to breathe.’ Fortunately the Russian government was sympathetic. The second secretary of the mission, Van der Hoeven, whose mother was a member of the Russian aristocracy, was authorised to present his credentials to Tsar Nicholas II. At the end of December 1898, Leyds was accredited as an envoy of the South African Republic in Russia as well.146
Chamberlain wasn’t pleased. Leyds hadn’t made a bad impression on him when they had met at the Diamond Jubilee in the summer of 1897. Even Lord Selborne, the colonial under-secretary, had a good word for him. Leyds was sociable, he thought, intelligent and pleasant-looking. And Chamberlain had admired his ‘shrewd evasions’ at the time of the Naval Review. At least Leyds wasn’t a backward Boer.
But that made him all the more dangerous. The Colonial Office’s South Africa expert, Fred Graham, had made this very point to his minister. Leyds was known to be totally unreliable, he reported. He was considered their most dangerous opponent. That was more important than the man’s personal charm, Selborne agreed. ‘All British South Africa... are united in believing him to be the enemy.’ True or not, what mattered was what people thought. The Transvaal’s new envoy in Europe, with his ‘Hollander policy’, was seen as the Boers’ evil genius. They had to keep that idea alive and nurture it.147
The Colonial Office and the Foreign Office kept Leyds under surveillance, observing his every move with suspicion. They had instructions to make his life difficult and tarnish his reputation in the press. Not officially, because that would be counterproductive. Objecting to his accreditation would embarrass the British government, Lord Salisbury wrote to Chamberlain. It would raise questions in the capitals of Europe and, before you knew it, that wretched arbitration business would raise its ugly head again. A disastrous scenario. Next, they would also be challenging Britain’s suzerainty over the Transvaal.148
That was the last thing Salisbury or Chamberlain wanted. Britain was making good progress with its colonial ambitions. In the summer of 1898, they would actually be sitting at the negotiation table with Germany to stake their claims in southern Africa. This had come about because of Portugal’s ongoing financial problems. The Portuguese had turned to London to secure a loan, offering the revenue from their colonies as security. Berlin had got wind of this and proposed talks. The British government had agreed. The two countries had discussed the matter—without Portugal—and then proceeded to negotiate in earnest. Their talks culminated in a British–German treaty, signed on 30 August 1898.
It had far-reaching implications. If there was to be a loan, they would extend it jointly. As security, Britain claimed the revenues from central Angola and Mozambique south of the Zambezi—including Delagoa Bay. The Germans would get the proceeds from the rest. If Portugal failed to recover financially, they would divide its colonial territories between themselves according to the same formula. This arrangement was a strategic coup for Britain, regardless of how things turned out for Portugal. At least Germany was out of the running for Delagoa Bay. It made no difference that Portugal managed to save its colonies by taking a loan in Paris: they had pre-empted an alliance between Germany and the Transvaal.149
This wasn’t their only successful manoeuvre. A new opportunity soon presented itself, this time in North Africa, where the age-old colonial rivalry between Britain and France was building up and threatening to erupt into a violent confrontation. The British imperialists’ vision of the Union Jack spanning the continent from the Cape to Cairo was incompatible with the French colonial party’s dream of the tricolour flying over Africa, from the Niger to the Nile. At some point the north-south and east-west lines would inevitably intersect. This happened at Fashoda, on the upper reaches of the Nile in present-day southern Sudan, in September 1898.
The main local protagonists were Major Jean-Baptiste Marchand and Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, two unevenly matched forces. Marchand limped in with barely a hundred men at the end of a gruelling two-year tramp through the African jungle. Meanwhile, Kitchener had arrived with a victorious army, straight from the city where he had defeated the formidable Sudanese Mahdi, and whose name he was subsequently entitled to use. If it had come to a battle, there was no doubt who would have won. But it never reached that point. The hostilities went no further than Marchand hoisting the French tricolour and Kitchener the Egyptian flag under protest. The conflict was thus taken to the level at which it belonged, that of international power politics.
In London, Lord Salisbury and Chamberlain confidently picked up the gauntlet. Their opposite number in Paris was Théophile Delcassé, the foreign minister, who was no less certain than they that his claims were justified, and no less driven by imperialist zeal. The big difference lay in the trumps the two sides could and were actually prepared to play. In that respect the game was just as unequal as Fashoda had been. Politically, Salisbury and Chamberlain were firmly in power, safe in the knowledge that their backs were covered by the recent treaty with Germany, and that they outnumbered their opponents in the region. Delcassé was in the middle of a political crisis. He received no support from his Russian ally, and was powerless to change the military balance of power. It was true that France had a far bigger army than Britain, but how could you get your soldiers to Africa as long as Britannia ruled the waves? There was nothing to do but pass. On 3 November 1898 Delcassé instructed Marchand to call the whole thing off.150
Britain was doing well on all colonial fronts. Chamberlain had every reason to gloat. France had been cut off from North Africa. Agreements with Germany had been bought off with Portuguese territory. Britain held sway over southern Africa. Now there were just the Boers. There was still a memorandum from Pretoria from six months earlier. Probably some nit-picking over that suzerainty business, and it was undoubtedly Leyds’s doing. It still had to be dealt with. Chamberlain’s staff had advised him not to respond to any of the points it raised, especially not the question of arbitration. Ignore it, they said, and rather insist on some issue that was open to debate; that always gets them flustered. It was 15 December 1898. Chamberlain began to dictate.