Reconciliation. A plan to keep the peace. Resolve the differences between Pretoria and Johannesburg. Hold talks in a spirit of mutual understanding. Make concessions. It wouldn’t be easy but it was certainly worth the try. War would destroy everything. It was a question of getting the right people and doing the right things in the right order. He had an idea.
Willem Leyds didn’t waste his time on trivialities during the voyage from Southampton to Cape Town. War or peace, the future of South Africa, the survival of the Transvaal as an independent state. He was on his way to Pretoria to report his findings in Europe after his first six months as the Transvaal’s official agent. He had plenty to think about, and at sea everything fell into place. There could only be one conclusion. No matter how fiercely he defended the Boer cause, the problem could not be solved by diplomatic exchanges or press campaigns. The problem was in the Transvaal itself. It lay in the conflict with the Randlords and the Uitlanders.
Only when that was resolved would there be a reasonable chance of winning the support of the gold-mining shareholders, the politicians and public opinion in the European countries that mattered—France, Germany and Russia. Only then would the Boers be in a position to cast themselves as the injured party, driven into a corner by Britain’s lust for power. As long as the conflict persisted, people would continue to believe that the Boers were in part to blame, that they blackmailed the mine owners and discriminated against their employees. Diplomacy and public relations could not move mountains.
On 28 January 1899, Leyds was back in Pretoria, where he had lived and worked for almost 14 years. Little had changed in the past six months except for the incumbents of two key positions. When Leyds became an envoy, his position as state secretary was taken over by the former president of the Orange Free State, F.W. Reitz, with whom Kruger had sought closer ties of friendship in 1889. Reitz had been obliged to resign for health reasons, but he had since recovered and was keen to continue his political career in the Transvaal. The young Jan Smuts was the new state attorney, on the brink of a long and dazzling career. Both men had been born in the Cape Colony and had studied law in Britain, from where they returned with their fanatical Afrikaner nationalism intact. Sons of the soil with knowledge of the world—it showed in all they did. Self-assured, erudite Boers with an easy commanding presence, a quality Leyds the Hollander had never managed to cultivate. Together with the old president they formed the new leadership in Pretoria, spanning three generations: Kruger was already 73, Reitz 54 and Smuts 28 years old.
All three agreed with Leyds’s ideas about reconciliation with Johannesburg and the intermediary he had in mind: Eduard Lippert, cousin of Alfred Beit, the uncrowned king of the Rand. Lippert was also the nuisance from the days of the railway and dynamite affairs, but after the Jameson Raid and the support he’d given Leyds in Germany, he had become a trusted friend. He presented the opening bid to representatives of the mining industry in late February 1899. The Transvaal government was offering to make substantial concessions on three points: it would amend the terms of the dynamite monopoly, relax the rules on the enfranchisement of Uitlanders and appoint a ‘treasurer’ to put the state’s financial affairs in order. In return, Pretoria wanted the mine owners to stop the press from agitating against the government, and to distance themselves from the South African League.
It was a genuine attempt to negotiate a deal. At first the prospects looked good. A number of Randlords were sufficiently interested to consider further talks—and put forward serious counter-proposals. Kruger emphasised his honourable intentions in three reconciliatory speeches, in Heidelberg (18 March), Rustenburg (27 March) and Johannesburg (1 April). If it had come to an agreement, he would have been honoured for this spectacular Great Deal. And Leyds, the man behind it, might have gone down in history as Willem the Conciliator.
But that was not to be. Honesty has to come from both sides. At least one of their negotiating partners was not playing the game. Percy FitzPatrick had been one of the Johannesburg conspirators sentenced for complicity in the Jameson Raid, first to death, then to imprisonment and in the end to a fine. The remissions had not appeased him. He still harboured a grudge against the Boer regime and against Kruger and Leyds in particular. The mere fact that he had been chosen to liaise on the mine owners’ behalf gave pause for thought. Even so, the Boer leaders gave him the benefit of the doubt.
Smuts had several confidential meetings with him, unaware that FitzPatrick’s real intention was to sabotage the talks. In close consultation with his superiors in London, Beit and Wernher, and the British representative in Pretoria, Conyngham Greene—and through him with the high commissioner in Cape Town, Sir Alfred Milner—FitzPatrick brought the episode to an abrupt end in late March 1899. He leaked the outcome of the secret talks to English-language newspapers in Johannesburg, Cape Town and London—with the expected results. At the beginning of April everything was out in the open, and anyone who had stuck out their neck went back on their word. The Great Deal had fizzled out, the opportunity to reach an internal solution between Pretoria and Johannesburg had passed. This was driven home by a petition drawn up by the South African League around the same time. Addressed to Queen Victoria, it was an appeal signed by 21,000 Uitlanders for measures to improve their legal status in the Transvaal.151
Leyds wasn’t around to witness the failure of his initiative. He had left Pretoria on 24 March 1899 to resume his life in Europe. He had a superficial encounter with Milner in Cape Town—the two men exchanged pleasantries, not a word about politics—and he completed a last chore. Chamberlain’s dispatch of 15 December 1898 on the question of suzerainty still needed a reply. Kruger and Reitz had asked Leyds to deal with it. He was, after all, their expert in that field. He hadn’t managed to work on it in Pretoria. Only in Cape Town was he able to give it his full attention. He sent his draft to Pretoria at the very last minute, before embarking for Europe on 30 March.
All the talk on board the Carisbrooke Castle was about the looming war and the rapidly fading chance of peace. Most of the British passengers feared that war was inevitable. It would also have ‘the support of the entire British nation’. Leyds found their conversation depressing. Two months earlier, on the voyage out, he had been optimistic. This time the waves broke against the ship’s hull like ominous portents. ‘It is clear that after the Fashoda Incident and its coalition with Germany, Britain considers itself master of the whole world.’152
Sir Alfred Milner was pleasantly surprised. Radical reforms in Pretoria, including recognition of British paramountcy in the whole of southern Africa—either that or war. This was what he had demanded in his Graaff-Reinet speech, more than a year earlier. He had been preparing himself for it ever since, and growing more and more impatient. Reconciliation between the Boers and the Randlords, disregarding Britain’s imperial claims, would have been a disaster, he felt. So he was pleased when FitzPatrick torpedoed the Great Deal. Add to that the Uitlanders’ widely supported petition to Queen Victoria and it was obvious: this was a golden opportunity to mobilise public opinion in Britain and put pressure on Chamberlain to take action.
They mustn’t throw away another opportunity. That had happened a few months earlier around Christmas 1898, when the Uitlanders had first appealed to the British head of state. It had been in response to the death of an English boilermaker, Tom Edgar. He had been shot in his own home by a Johannesburg policeman who had come to arrest him. The authorities maintained it was self-defence. To the British community it was murder, committed by one of the despicable ‘Zarps’. A Tom Edgar Relief Committee was set up with help from the South African League, and thousands of Uitlanders demonstrated in the streets. They called for a hearing of the policeman, who was out on bail, better protection against random actions by the police, and more political rights. Those demands were set out in a petition, which was presented to Her Majesty’s representative in Cape Town a few days later.
Milner was in London for talks at the time. The reaction of his deputy, Lieutenant-General Sir William Butler, commander-in-chief of the British troops in South Africa, came as a shock. Butler was sympathetic to the Boers, that much was known, and he had little time for the Uitlanders. That was no secret either. But no one had expected him to refuse the petition—as he did. Moreover, he informed Chamberlain that it was ‘all a prepared business’, fabricated by the South African League, whom he considered the ‘direct descendants’ of the raiders and reformers of 1895. Butler was sure that Rhodes was behind it.
But he was wrong about that. It was FitzPatrick—in the wings—who had orchestrated it. Milner probably forgave him for the mistake when he got back to Cape Town. But what he didn’t forgive was Butler’s refusal to accept the petition. It was an unspeakable act of defiance, which Milner called ‘out-Krugering Kruger’. It was a flagrant and inexcusable breach of his carefully planned policies. If it were up to him, Butler would have been stripped of his command. And in time, he actually was. Six months later, Butler was forced to resign.
Milner didn’t have to wait that long for another chance to correct Butler’s error. At the end of March 1899, he received the second petition from the Uitlanders, which was potentially explosive, as he knew from his experience as a journalist for the Pall Mall Gazette. If it was used properly, the voting issue could swell into a ‘stirring battle cry’ in Britain itself—that’s where it had to happen.
Milner had already taken care of public opinion in South Africa. He was on good terms with the editor-in-chief of the Cape Times and had the support of two Transvaal newspapers owned by Wernher, Beit & Co. The Star had been the leading English-language newspaper on the Rand for years, and in March it had been joined by the Transvaal Leader. Both papers had been instrumental in stirring up complaints from the Uitlanders, which they did with renewed vigour when the negotiations between Pretoria and Johannesburg fell through. The chief editor of The Star, William Monypenny, played a prominent role. He had come from Fleet Street specially to add a toxic finishing touch to the rabble-rousing and to work as correspondent for The Times in England.
Things were going well in Johannesburg as far as Milner was concerned. FitzPatrick and Monypenny were the perfect firebrands to keep stoking the flame of nationalism. Now the spark needed to catch in London, which was more of a problem. The Uitlanders’ second petition attracted attention and support, in government circles and from the public, but it failed to provoke the conflagration Milner had been hoping for. To his annoyance South Africa disappeared from the front pages in the course of April. What should he do? Too much pressure on Chamberlain would be counterproductive, he had seen that. There was nothing for it but to steel himself and wait for another opportunity.
It came a couple of weeks later. Chamberlain made the opening move. He needed a hot-blooded statement from the high commissioner for the Blue Book he was having compiled about the latest developments in the Transvaal. That he could get. But Milner put extra work into it and added ‘some vitriol’ of his own. The result is known as the ‘Helot Dispatch’. The Boers, Milner wrote, were reducing thousands of British subjects to slavery, like the helots of ancient Sparta. Their appeals to the British government had been futile. What were they waiting for? ‘The case for intervention is overwhelming’, he concluded. The regime in Pretoria had nothing to offer except malicious lies about Britain’s intentions.
Milner realised perfectly well it was a gamble. By the same token, Chamberlain might have felt pressured by the urgency of his tone. Or the explicit call for intervention might raise objections in the Cabinet. This time he didn’t have to wait long. On 9 May 1899, he received a telegram saying, ‘The despatch is approved. We have adopted your suggestion.’ That was wonderful news. Chamberlain was in agreement and, by the looks of it, Lord Salisbury too. Whitehall agreed to immediate intervention: peaceful intervention for the time being, but one thing leads to another. Milner was sure that when the Blue Book was published, his Helot Dispatch would jolt the British public out of their complacency.
The only pity was that pacifists were suddenly starting to crawl out of the woodwork. First, Prime Minister Schreiner and Jan Hofmeyr in the Cape Colony, followed by President Steyn in the Orange Free State. They insisted on a personal meeting with Kruger. Milner was against it, but with the world looking on, he could hardly refuse. Chamberlain thought it a good idea. The publication of the Blue Book was postponed for the time being.
On 31 May 1899, Milner reported at the place Steyn had proposed for the meeting, the railway station in Bloemfontein. He came not to negotiate but to issue an ultimatum: full electoral rights for all Uitlanders after five years’ residence, with immediate and retroactive effect, and seven representatives in the Volksraad. His only fear was that Kruger, the sly old fox, would actually concede—and start haggling afterwards. That would put Milner back to square one. He would have to start building up the tension all over again. His best hope was that the Bloemfontein Conference would fail.
It did. Kruger had not come to the talks in the capital of the Orange Free State with high expectations, but he did observe the rules of the game. Concessions and compromises. On the third day, for instance, he produced a carefully prepared reform bill, like a rabbit out of a hat. Five seats in the Volksraad for the gold-mining districts and voting rights for Uitlanders within variable time frames: within two to seven years, depending on how long they had been in the Transvaal.
Relative to the population demographics, this was a substantial concession. According to the most recent census, published in the State Almanac for the South African Republic of 1899, the electorate—adult male Boers—comprised fewer than 30,000 voters. The total white population in the Transvaal had grown to almost ten times that number: 290,000 men, women and children. The statistics further included a coloured population of 600,000. Of the white population in Johannesburg and its immediate surroundings, over 50,000 were male Uitlanders. Once they were armed with voting rights, there were more than enough of them to significantly impact the political balance of power in the Transvaal.153
Kruger’s offer came close to meeting Milner’s demands. Promisingly close, thought Chamberlain, who promptly congratulated Milner by telegram. Dangerously close, thought Milner, who raised countless objections and warned Chamberlain that the talks were on the brink of collapse. The reaction from London—keep going, ‘Boers do not understand quick decisions’—reached him too late. On 5 June 1899 Milner walked out of the conference, free to return to his original plan and provoke a head-on confrontation.154
Joe Chamberlain spent a long time dithering. He agreed with his high commissioner in South Africa that they would have to bring Kruger to his knees. But so much the better if they could achieve this by diplomatic means. It wouldn’t need to come to an armed struggle as long as the old Boer leader accepted Britain’s terms: equal rights for the Uitlanders. They had made such an issue of it that they couldn’t back down without losing face. But the most contentious issue was British supremacy in South Africa. This was something Kruger would have to acknowledge, one way or another, officially and in practice.
That is why Chamberlain was troubled by Pretoria’s reply to his letter of 15 December 1898 on the question of suzerainty. It was dated 9 May 1899 and had presumably been written by someone other than Leyds—Leyds had left Pretoria at the end of March. The hair-splitting in some of the legal passages was still obviously his work, but one sentence was unusually hard-hitting. It argued that the Transvaal’s right to self-determination was not based on the London Convention of 1884, but was simply a right in itself. Leyds had never expressed himself with such self-confidence—well, presumption in fact. Milner was taken aback. Chamberlain also considered the Transvaal’s claim to full sovereign status unacceptable. He saw it as a threat to ‘our position as the paramount power in South Africa’.155
This would certainly justify tightening the diplomatic thumbscrews on the Boer republic. But war? Chamberlain hadn’t reached that point in June 1899. Milner’s haste to break off the talks with Kruger in Bloemfontein had alarmed him and the entire staff of the Colonial Office—with the exception of the under-secretary, Lord Selborne, Milner’s rock and anchor through thick and thin. Moreover, if it came to an armed confrontation, Chamberlain would be dependent on the War Ministry for troops—and that was more than just a formal obstacle. Lord Lansdowne headed a decaying and hopelessly divided department, which was blasé about the military threat posed by the Boers. They had made no preparations of any significance.
The country as a whole was not yet fired up for war. Newspapers like The Times and the Morning Post beat the drum for the Uitlanders as best they could. On Milner’s advice Percy FitzPatrick published a hawkish book, The Transvaal from Within, which became the bestseller of the summer season. But there were other opinions as well. The Blue Book, which incorporated the Helot Dispatch, was not enough to get the fires burning. There were murmurs of scepticism and dismay. The satirical weekly magazine Punch showed a very different ‘South African helot’: well fed, with a heavy gold chain standing for wealth not slavery, stylish clothes and a jewelled tie pin. ‘Such a man may be many things, but a helot he is not.’156
For a while the threat of war seemed to have passed. In mid-July 1899, Pretoria agreed to more concessions than Kruger had already proposed in Bloemfontein. A new law gave the Uitlanders six seats in the Volksraad and voting rights after seven years, with retroactive effect. This prompted Chamberlain to congratulate Milner—again. It prompted Milner to warn his minister—again—to watch out for the traps and pitfalls in the Boers’ proposal. He also had a counter-proposal. A joint (British–Transvaal) commission of inquiry to look into the franchise issue from all angles.
Selborne agreed immediately, which helped to get Chamberlain ‘back on the old right tack’. On 28 July 1899, in the only House of Commons session that dealt with South Africa that year, he was far less enthusiastic about the latest reforms in Pretoria. It wasn’t about getting voting rights two years earlier or later, he said. It wasn’t about the petty details. A special committee—he had learned from Milner’s advice—would be in a better position to judge all of that. No, this was about something more fundamental. It was about ‘the power and authority of the British Empire... It is the question of our predominance.’ This was a clear statement and it persuaded both the government and opposition parties. Parliament was satisfied and went into recess. The Cabinet members went off to their summer residences, Chamberlain to Highbury, his country estate in Birmingham, to devote himself to his orchids. The proposal to set up a joint commission of inquiry was put to the Transvaal government.
Three weeks later, on 19 August 1899, a reply came from Pretoria. They saw a joint commission as an infringement of the Transvaal’s autonomy and rejected the proposal on those grounds. But Kruger came up with a new offer which, on the face of it, seemed extraordinary. Voting rights for the Uitlanders after five years, with retroactive force, and ten seats for the Rand in a Volksraad that would be enlarged to a total of 36 members. That was even more than Milner had asked for in Bloemfontein. But there was one string attached. In return the British government would have to renounce its claims to suzerainty and stop meddling in the Transvaal’s internal affairs.
It seemed like a final offer, a last concession—and it was. But that made no difference to the way it was received in Cape Town and London. The authorities there reacted exactly the way they had on previous occasions. Milner rejected the offer out of hand as yet another ploy by the Boer leader, an inadequate concession that failed to take account of Britain’s status ‘as the Paramount Power in South Africa’. Chamberlain needed a few more days. In his initial reaction he called it ‘a complete climb down’ on Kruger’s part and told Lord Salisbury that the crisis had been warded off. But on 24 August it turned out that he had changed his mind after hearing Milner’s arguments. And this time, there would be no turning back. Now, he conveyed a very different message to the prime minister and the secretary for war, Lord Lansdowne. He said the Boers would have to clarify their offer and withdraw their conditions, which were totally unacceptable. If they failed to do so within a week to ten days, they were presumably not interested in peace. In that event, Britain would immediately dispatch an expeditionary force of 10,000 men. Two days later Chamberlain ran out of patience. In a speech delivered from the lawns of Highbury Hall, he repeated his warning to Kruger. He said the president of the Transvaal had set impossible conditions and was withholding the details of his reform proposals. Things couldn’t continue like this. ‘The sands are running down in the glass.’157
The threat was clear. But Kruger made no further concessions. On the contrary, he withdrew his second offer and left the question of a joint commission open. Too half-hearted, in Chamberlain’s opinion. On his instructions, Lord Salisbury summoned the Cabinet members back to London.
The Cabinet convened on 8 September 1899. Chamberlain presented a memorandum, summarising his standpoint once again. The Uitlanders were being treated as ‘an inferior race, little better than Kaffirs or Indians’. Great Britain’s position was being jeopardised in South Africa, as was its prestige in its colonies and the rest of the world. The president of the Transvaal was unwilling to accede to the justified demands of the British government. They had no choice but to bare their teeth. Chamberlain assured the honourable members that this did not necessarily mean war. Kruger had the reputation of being a man who would ‘bluff up to the cannon’s mouth and then capitulate’. An expeditionary force of 10,000 men would persuade him that they were in earnest. This would probably make him give up.
Not all the ministers agreed with Chamberlain’s point of view and certainly not with his aggressive tone, but his last argument—Kruger’s notorious posturing—won them over. The Cabinet agreed to the immediate dispatch of an expeditionary force. Once it arrived in Natal, probably at the beginning of October, they would issue an ultimatum.
The prime minister, Lord Salisbury, had the last word. He was sombre. He didn’t believe that Kruger would back down. He had no doubt they were heading for war, for Britain possibly the biggest since the Crimean War. He bitterly regretted it, especially as the stakes were so low, ‘all for people whom we despise and for territory which will bring no power to England’. But there was no other choice. He knew that South Africa was strategically too important to the British Empire. Some time earlier, he had expressed these thoughts to his son-in-law Lord Selborne, the under-secretary for the colonies: ‘The real point to be made good to South Africa is that we, not the Dutch, are Boss.’158
Paul Kruger stood firm: no more concessions. Chamberlain wanted war: that much was obvious from his doom-laden speech of 26 August. And the same message was there, in as many words, in the letter he wrote two days later. For months Kruger had done everything in his power to meet Britain’s demands. This was the result. Kruger no longer believed in Britain’s good faith. ‘It is our country you want,’ he had snapped back at Milner on the last day of their talks in Bloemfontein in early June. It was now two months later, 2 September 1899, and he had been proved right. More than that, it was not only Milner; ‘Camberlen’ too wanted to incorporate the Transvaal in the British Empire. There was no doubt in Kruger’s mind. No matter how much the Boers in the Cape Colony and the Orange Free State pleaded for further negotiations, he no longer believed anything could come of it. He had done enough listening. Schreiner and Hofmeyr, Steyn and his right-hand man, Abraham Fischer, and of course his own state secretary and state attorney, Reitz and Smuts—all of them had given him well-intentioned advice, but look where it had led.
It had all started with the Great Deal, in early April. It was the capitalists who had sabotaged it, there was no denying that, but it had also been naive to trust FitzPatrick. Moreover, the reply to Chamberlain’s suzerainty letter, in early May, had been carelessly worded. Leyds had prepared a draft, in his usual meticulous style, but Reitz—or Smuts, he wasn’t sure which—had added those passages about the Transvaal’s inherent rights as an independent state under international law. They had struck the wrong chord with Milner and Chamberlain, and Reitz had been forced to back down in their further communications.
To say nothing of the frustrating voting rights they had talked him into conceding—completely against his will. First, his proposal to Milner at the Bloemfontein Conference in early June. Then the reform bill that the Volksraad passed in mid-July. Finally, the last offer of 19 August, making even more concessions than Milner had asked for. And the outcome? Threats from Chamberlain. The more Kruger conceded, the more the British demanded. What more could he do? Young Boers were clamouring to drive the British into the sea. Friendly governments urged discretion. A decision had to be taken. There would be war.
The Rand had already drawn that conclusion. In the first six months of 1899 the gold mines had produced record yields, but in the South African winter of that year Johannesburg and its surrounds found themselves facing a reverse gold rush. In August it was almost an exodus. Tens of thousands of black miners were laid off. An even greater number of Uitlanders were looking for somewhere else to go. In September there was utter panic. A stampede of miners, craftsmen, barkeepers and prostitutes. Anyone lucky enough to squeeze into a train, an oxwagon or any other vehicle fled to the Cape Colony or Natal. By late September most of the gold mines had shut down. Johannesburg became just another quiet, provincial town.159
In Pretoria, too, everyone was preparing to leave—for the front. Reitz and Smuts agreed with Kruger. There was no way to avoid a war, certainly not after the Cabinet meeting of 8 September 1899, when the British decided to send out an expeditionary force. It would take a month for the troops to reach South Africa. They had to put the time to good use. Smuts hastily worked out a plan. He was in favour of a surprise attack. The Boers were by far in the majority. If they invaded Natal without delay, they could easily push through to Durban and seize the artillery and munitions they found there, thus depriving the British of their nearest supply port. In all likelihood the Afrikaners in the Cape Colony would join in and fight with them. With a third Boer republic against them, the British would have a hard time of it. And France, Russia and Germany wouldn’t hesitate to take advantage of the situation.160
The plan didn’t sound unreasonable, but Smuts never had the opportunity to see it in action. The Orange Free State, President Steyn to be exact, wasn’t ready to take the step. He still believed in a peaceful solution and kept offering suggestions. Kruger dutifully considered them. He thought it a waste of time, but he was unwilling to antagonise his ally by launching an attack on his own. As a result, he spent weeks waiting for Bloemfontein.
Smuts was too fired up to wait. To occupy himself usefully in the meantime, he started writing a historical pamphlet, with the help of Jacob de Villiers Roos. A Century of Wrong was an impassioned protest against ‘our oppression and persecution during the past hundred years’. It was meant to rally Afrikaners throughout the country, in the two British colonies as well as the two Boer republics, to resist ‘an unjust and hated Government 7000 miles away’. The Boers were the heroes, the British the villains. The piece was rhetorical and demagogic, even by nineteenth-century standards.
It portrayed the British as hypocrites motivated by ‘a spirit of annexation and plunder which has at all times characterised its dealings with our people’. They had a ‘morbid love of the natives’, which wasn’t that so much as ‘hatred and contempt of the Boer’. After the discovery of the republic’s mineral wealth, they had harnessed their old insidious policies to the new forces of capitalism and drawn a ‘cordon of beasts of plunder and birds of prey... around this poor doomed people’.
In spite of their ‘great sacrifices... and the many vicissitudes’ they had endured, the Boers possessed ‘a dignity which reminds the world of a greater and more painful example of suffering’. They had pursued their ‘pilgrimage of martyrdom throughout South Africa, until every portion of that unhappy country has been painted red with the blood, not so much of men capable of resistance as with that of our murdered and defenceless women and children’. Through it all they had clung to ‘the Righteousness which... proceeds according to eternal laws, unmoved by human pride and ambition’.
The last chapter sounded like a reply to the Helot Dispatch. Milner was from Oxford, Smuts from Cambridge and at least as well versed in the classics. He likened Britain, which was conveying ‘troops from every corner of the globe in order to smash this little handful of people’, to the Persian king Xerxes ‘with his millions against little Greece’. And the Boers, of course, were the Spartans, Leonidas ‘with his 300 men when they advanced unflinchingly at Thermopylae against Xerxes and his myriads’. And ‘whether the result be Victory or Death, Liberty will assuredly rise in South Africa like the sun from out of the mists of the morning, just as Freedom dawned over the United States of America a little more than a century ago. Then from the Zambezi to Simon’s Bay it will be “Africa for the Africander”.’161
By 28 September 1899 Kruger had grown tired of waiting. A few days earlier he had heard that the British expeditionary force would be followed by a complete army corps. The Transvaal mobilised. On 2 October the Orange Free State did the same. Even Steyn saw no way out.
Willem Leyds felt uncomfortable. He was doing the best he could for the Boer cause, but he was miles away. His business was diplomacy and public relations; he was no longer involved with policy. He travelled back and forth between Brussels, The Hague, Paris and Amsterdam, and occasionally Berlin. It was useful, he got things done, but still. ‘I wish I were in Pretoria,’ he wrote to two of his confidants in the Transvaal in mid-August 1899. ‘I believe in all modesty that I could be of some use.’ The government consulted him frequently, his telegraph bills were high, but ‘one can say far more in person than by cable from a distance’.162
Not only by way of encouragement. Leyds was also critical of his successors in Pretoria. They kept vacillating, he felt. They were either too assertive or too submissive. The best example was their reply to Chamberlain’s suzerainty letter. All his hard work had been ruined by the rash sentence they had added to it, and Chamberlain was quick to exploit his advantage. Leyds was also critical of the tone of the voting rights proposals. The wording was extremely important, he said. It sounded as if the concessions had been extracted with a knife at someone’s throat. The British didn’t like that kind of thing. What’s more, Pretoria’s indecisiveness made his job as an envoy more difficult. He wasn’t informed promptly about new developments, and his instructions were often unclear.
But so be it. It was questionable whether his presence in Pretoria would really have made any difference, as it was now obvious that Milner and Chamberlain were intent on war. Beit, too, for that matter—because Leyds kept a sharp eye on things from his observation post in Europe. ‘Everyone with a financial interest in South Africa dances to the tune of Wernher, Beit & Co.,’ he said. They were so powerful that ‘no one can stand up to them, and to avoid being boycotted they do whatever Beit wants (Wernher is less overbearing) and Beit in turn takes his orders from Chamberlain’.163
From reports like this, it seems Leyds was probably more useful in Europe than he would have been in the Transvaal—on the one hand, by keeping Pretoria up to date about the mood in the European capitals, in centres of government and financial circles and among the general public, on the other hand, by supporting the Transvaal and improving its image. He picked up the thread of the pro-Boer campaign he had launched in 1898. It was vitally important. After a visit to Paris in late April 1899, he noted that ‘the press have launched another campaign against the Republic’. He had to be vigilant and make sure he exposed all their half-truths and slurs. They targeted him personally as well. The Financial Times, for example, reported that he had made money from illicit dealings in gold during his term as state secretary. It was a shot in the dark, but it was hard to disprove. You could deny false allegations, but you couldn’t erase them from people’s minds.164
Some of Leyds’s duties were in the public eye, but most of his work took place behind closed doors. His diplomatic activities ranged from finding suitable state investors and organising the Transvaal’s entry to the Paris World Fair in 1900, to mediating (this was a sensitive matter) to secure the release of a munitions transport under embargo in Lourenço Marques.
It was a consignment of Mausers and more than three and a half million cartridges, en route from German Weapons and Munitions to Pretoria. In the past few years several arms transports had been sent via Mozambique, but for no apparent reason the Portuguese authorities suddenly started to raise objections—under pressure from Britain, the Transvaal government believed. In mid-August Leyds was instructed to go to Lisbon post-haste to put pressure on the Portuguese from his side as well. He was also advised to inform the German government. After all, the goods came from Germany and were being transported on a German vessel, the Reichstag. Leyds followed this advice, although not quite to the letter. He didn’t actually go to Lisbon, but handed the Portuguese envoy in Brussels a memorandum of protest and then concentrated on applying pressure indirectly. This he did with help not only from Berlin, but also Paris, because France would soon be shipping arms—two large Creusot guns—along the same route. They would be labelled ‘machinery’ but, even so, it was better for the French to know about these developments—and use their influence with Portugal. At the end of August the port authorities in Lourenço Marques released the consignment of rifles and munitions.165
Thanks to Germany and France. But Pretoria shouldn’t be under any illusions, Leyds warned more than once. This time it had been purely in their own interests. If pressed, neither would side against Britain. His telegrams were absolutely explicit. On 3 August 1899 he said, ‘if it comes to a war, Germany and France will be cordial towards us and might express that openly, but they won’t give us any real support’. His message of 25 September read, ‘Germany will do nothing. France would gladly make things difficult for Britain, but one can’t depend on them. They’re unpredictable. However, the general consensus is that Russia might intervene in Asia.’166
Russia might well see a war between Great Britain and the Transvaal as an opportunity to pursue its own interests. Whatever the case, no one expected Tsar Nicholas II to do anything out of conviction. Under pressure from Britain he hadn’t invited the Transvaal or the Orange Free State to the Peace Conference held in The Hague from mid-May to the end of July 1899. Leyds had avoided The Hague throughout that period. ‘I’m in a rather tight spot,’ he had said.167
But he was gratified to see that the exclusion of the two Boer republics had unleashed a storm of protest in the Netherlands, in the press and in parliament. That was reassuring in itself, although the criticism was targeted, unfairly, at the foreign minister, Willem de Beaufort. Abraham Kuyper, the leader of the Anti-Revolutionary Party, went so far as to hold the minister personally responsible for the snub against ‘the two Dutch commonwealths’ and accused him of ‘unforgivable weakness’. Leyds knew better. It had all been arranged beforehand. De Beaufort had only two options: conference or no conference, in The Hague or anywhere else.
Leyds also knew that all the fuss in the Netherlands had no impact on the rest of the world, least of all in Britain. In the spring, the Dutch Women’s Association had presented a petition with 200,000 signatures to Tsar Nicholas II, endorsing his peace initiative. In August the Dutch South African Association had collected 140,000 signatures in support of an impassioned appeal on behalf of the Boers, addressed ‘To the People of Great Britain’. The petitions were received politely, but at this stage they carried no weight at all. They were well-meant but irrelevant.168
Leyds had reached this conclusion a few months earlier, after a similar campaign in the Transvaal that actually could have made a difference. A petition to Queen Victoria from 21,000 Uitlanders in late March 1899 was followed two months later by a second petition from 23,000—dissenting—Uitlanders. The text read, ‘We disagree with the sentiments and opinions expressed in the memorial [the first petition to Queen Victoria] because we know that life and property are as safe and secure in the S.A. Republic as in any part of the civilized world.’ The signatories, unlike the South African League, stood firmly behind the government of the Transvaal. It was clear that the immigrant community on the Rand was sharply divided over the Kruger regime.
Pretoria made sure the British government was aware of the second petition, and sent copies to Berlin, Paris, The Hague and Washington as well. But after that—perhaps even more surprising than the petition itself—nothing at all happened. There was no response whatsoever, although the earlier appeal to Queen Victoria resounded in the British press for a long time afterwards. Leyds had got the message. The time for public petitions had passed. It all came down to power politics.169
This point of view was reflected in an extraordinary correspondence that Leyds conducted from mid-July to the end of September 1899. It started with a letter from his old mentor and friend Moltzer, who was a member of the Dutch Council of State and still deeply concerned with the fate of the Boers. Was there anything the Dutch government could do to prevent a war with England? If so, he would take it up at once with Prime Minister Nicolaas Pierson, whom Leyds knew well.
Leyds thought there was. He made a suggestion but it fell flat with his other teacher. The idea was an urgent appeal from the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina—‘a young girl on the threshold of her career’—to Queen Victoria—‘an older woman nearing the end of her life’—but Pierson thought it too much of a gamble. He wasn’t prepared to risk ‘compromising the Queen’. He also made it clear—on behalf of the foreign minister De Beaufort, as well—that nothing could be expected from ‘the Dutch Government as such’. Like everyone else, the Netherlands was too dependent on mighty Britain, not least because of the vulnerable Dutch East Indies.170
The correspondence might have ended there had Pierson not offered to take action in a personal capacity. He was close friends with George Goschen, First Lord of the Admiralty and thus a member of the Salisbury government. He suggested that a personal letter might help to change the British Cabinet’s standpoint, from the inside. The Dutch prime minister respected the British and believed they were open to reason. In fact he was known to be ‘an anglophile and admitted it himself’. He made no secret of his conviction that the Transvaal ‘should have pursued a liberal policy’ far earlier and should have moved towards ‘admitting the British on the same terms as the Dutch’. If Leyds approved, Pierson was prepared to have a word with Goschen.
Leyds was not in favour but thanked him politely for the offer. What followed was a rather schizophrenic exchange of letters between the two men. On the one side Pierson, who reported to Leyds about his increasingly hopeful contacts with Goschen. From this Pierson had concluded that ‘there is a strong pacifist trend in the British Cabinet’. On the other side Leyds, who observed academic decorum by addressing Pierson as ‘Learned Professor’, only to tell him, with indecorous bluntness, what he thought of his optimism. On 22 August 1899 he wrote, ‘You still believe in the possibility of winning Goschen over. I don’t.’ Pierson kept on writing, nevertheless, to Goschen as well as Leyds. On 26 September he wrote again about ‘a pacifist movement in the British Cabinet’. The Transvaal shouldn’t allow its understandable mistrust of Britain to stand in the way of concessions, he argued. Bilingualism could actually work. Take the Belgian parliament, for example.171
His words fell on deaf ears. Fifteen years earlier Pierson had managed to persuade an ambivalent young lawyer to seek his fortune in South Africa, dwelling on the excellent prospects that awaited him as state attorney. Now he was trying to convince a sceptical statesman that concessions were the answer, elaborating on the opportunities for peace that were still open in London. His efforts were to no avail. Leyds no longer believed in it. Nor did he have any confidence left in the British Cabinet. It was time to get things over and done with.
That’s what he told Pretoria. He wrote to Reitz on 6 October, ‘The whole of Europe is wondering why the Boers don’t start the war, after telling or rather asking the British to withdraw their troops. Everyone thinks it’s suicide to wait for a large British force to arrive in Natal.’ On 9 October he mentioned Europe’s bewilderment again. A day later, on Kruger’s 74th birthday, Leyds received the telegram he had long been expecting. The Boers had issued their ultimatum. The war would begin the following day.172
