Lord Salisbury and Joseph Chamberlain worked together during the crisis of the Jameson Raid and Kruger Telegram, but the relationship between the two men had not always been amiable. As a young man, Chamberlain had flirted with republicanism. “The Republic must come1 and at the rate we are moving, it will come in our generation! I do not feel any great horror at the idea,” he had said. As a junior minister in Gladstone’s third government, Chamberlain had attacked the House of Lords. “The Divine Right of Kings—that2 was a dangerous delusion,” Chamberlain had declared, “but the divine right of peers is a ridiculous figment. We will never be the only race in the civilized world subservient to the insolent pretensions of an hereditary caste.” Chamberlain made his attack personal: “Lord Salisbury constitutes himself3 the spokesman... of the class to which he himself belongs, who toil not, neither do they spin, whose great fortunes, as in his case, have originated by grants made in times gone by for the services which courtiers rendered kings.”
“Who toil not, neither do they spin”—the phrase rang through the nation. Lord Salisbury described the young Radical Liberal from Birmingham as “a Sicilian bandit.”4 When Chamberlain threatened a march on London by tens of thousands of his Birmingham constituents to protest the power of the House of Lords, Lord Salisbury suggested that Mr. Chamberlain himself should march in the van. “My impression,”5 Salisbury declared grimly, “is that those who will have to receive him will be able to give a very good account... and that Mr. Chamberlain will return from his adventure with a broken head if nothing worse.” Chamberlain accepted the challenge and proposed that Lord Salisbury lead the Tory combatants. “In that case6 if my head is broken, it will be broken in very good company.” He flung out another dare: “I would advise him7 [Lord Salisbury] to try another experiment.... He has had picnics at Hatfield... and picnics at half the noblemen’s seats in the country. Now let him try to picnic in Hyde Park. I will promise him that he will have a larger meeting than he ever addressed and that it will be quite unnecessary for him to go to the expense of any fireworks.”
This firebrand now sat with Salisbury at the Cabinet table. Joseph Chamberlain was born on July 8, 1836, into a middle-class family south of the Thames in London. In school, he took prizes in mathematics and French, but when he was sixteen his father insisted that he end his formal education and enter the family business, making fine Spanish leather boots and shoes. Two years later, Joseph, again at his father’s request, went to live in Birmingham to help in a new metal-screw factory jointly owned by his father and uncle. For eighteen years, Chamberlain made screws; when he retired in 1872, his factory produced two thirds of all the metal screws manufactured in England. At thirty-six, a wealthy man, Joseph Chamberlain was able to concentrate on other things.
Wistful about his own truncated training, he had a lifelong interest in education. When John Morley took him to visit Oxford and they had gone “round the garden walks,8 antique gates and ‘massy piles of old munificence,’” Chamberlain turned to Morley and said, “‘Ah, how I wish that I could have had a training in this place.’ Yet [Morley said] he came to be more widely read... than most men in public life.” Chamberlain’s concern was for children’s education. In 1870, 2 million of 4.3 million school-age children never attended school, and another million attended on a haphazard, intermittent basis. In Birmingham, children ran ragged, barefoot, and wild through the streets. Chamberlain became an advocate of compulsory, free education. While still making screws, he had been elected President of the Birmingham Board of Education. In 1870, as a private businessman, he had visited No. 10 Downing Street, where he had acted as spokesman for a delegation from the National Education League.
Within a year of retirement from manufacturing, Joseph Chamberlain was Mayor of Birmingham. Although he held office only three years, he developed an absolute political control over the city which he maintained for the rest of his life. This gave him an advantage over other national politicians; their followings were scattered throughout Britain while Chamberlain’s was solidly concentrated in the middle class and urban proletariat of Birmingham and the Midlands. Here, his leadership was never challenged; where he led from one issue to another—even from one party to another—his followers marched behind.
Chamberlain commanded this allegiance even though he scarcely looked like a social reformer or a friend of the workingman. Of medium height, with a pale, clean-shaven face, Chamberlain was a self-creation sartorially as well as politically. He wore elegant cutaways and topcoats, a red cravat drawn through a gold ring, and a fresh orchid pinned daily in his buttonhole. A gold-rimmed monocle attached to a black ribbon popped in and out of his right eye. Once in Birmingham, he appeared at a municipal meeting wearing a tailored sealskin topcoat. His fellow citizens admiringly called him a “swell”;9 in the city and in wider circles too, he was known as “the King of Birmingham.” In 1874, Mayor Chamberlain welcomed the Prince and Princess of Wales as visitors to Birmingham. Despite speculation in the Conservative press that the “Radical demagogue” who advocated a republic would show disrespect to the Heir to the Throne, Chamberlain ushered the royal couple through a parade, a reception, and a lunch at the Town Hall. Rising to toast the Prince, the Mayor declared, “Here in England10 the throne is recognized and respected as the symbol of all constituted authority and settled government.” Not long after, Chamberlain was invited to dine at Marlborough House.
Chamberlain’s life, blessed by early business and political success, was marred by personal tragedy. He had married at twenty-five and again at thirty. Both of his young wives—who were themselves first cousins—had died in childbirth while producing sons.fn1 These shocks had left Chamberlain feeling that “it seems almost impossible11 to live.” Soon after his second wife died, a report went around Birmingham that he had been killed in a carriage accident. “Unfortunately,” he noted, “it wasn’t true12 and the friends who came to look at my remains, found me presiding over a Gas committee.”
In the summer of 1876, at forty, Chamberlain was elected unopposed to Parliament. During the campaign, in a vituperative moment, he hurled abuse at the Conservative Prime Minister, Lord Beaconsfield. Beaconsfield, Chamberlain said, was “a man who never told the truth13 except by accident; a man who went down to the House of Commons and flung at the British Parliament the first lie that entered his head.” Subsequently, Chamberlain apologized in writing. Entering the Commons as a Radical member of the Liberal Party, Chamberlain, unlike most M.P.’s, had had experience administering the affairs of a large city. He understood the problems of housing, education, and sanitation as they affected the lives of the urban poor, and he aired these problems in Parliament. His audience, expecting a fiery Radical demagogue,14 were surprised by his incisive style. Chamberlain’s beliefs were passionate, but his speeches never passed the boundaries of logic. “His strength in debate,”15 reported a journalist, “was that he always attacked and never bothered to defend himself.” Observers “watched him and wondered16 what answer he would give to this or that seemingly unanswerable point made by an opponent. In nine cases out of ten, he made no answer, but by the time he sat down, he had changed the entire issue and now the question was what answer the next man was going to make to him.” When he was challenged, Chamberlain’s figure stiffened and a cool smile fixed itself on his face. The impresssion was of “a man of obvious mystery17 with rather frightening qualities held in leash... his voice was fascinating, but it had a dangerous quality to it, and a sentence begun in a low tone, would come to a trenchant conclusion with something like a hiss.”
When the Liberals returned to power in 1880, Gladstone discovered that Chamberlain, an M.P. for only four years, expected to be in the Cabinet. After negotiations which included a threat from Chamberlain to lead a Radical splinter party if he was not included, Gladstone made him President of the Board of Trade. The government was Liberal, but the member from Birmingham found himself sitting at a Cabinet table with men quite different from himself. Half his colleagues were peers; three fourths were hostile to his proposals for social reform. Nevertheless, the arrangement succeeded. When Chamberlain struck too harsh a note or advanced farther on a path than his colleagues would follow, the Prime Minister wrote him a fatherly note, stressing the need in politics for moderation and compromise.
In 1886, Gladstone decided to crown his long public career by giving Home Rule to Ireland. A separate and independent parliament was to sit in Dublin with full powers of taxation and appointment of magistrates and other officials. The British Parliament in London, stripped of Irish members, would retain control of defense and foreign affairs. Chamberlain, hearing Gladstone’s proposal, was dismayed. In his view, “the Irish people are entitled18 to the largest measure of self-government consistent with the continued integrity of the Empire.” But Gladstone, he thought, had gone too far. “It was mischievous or worse,”19 Chamberlain said, “to talk of maintaining the unity of the Empire while granting Home Rule.” He cited the precedent of the American Civil War: “To preserve the Union,20 the Northern States of America poured out their blood and treasure like water.... If Englishmen still possess the courage... we shall maintain unimpaired the effective Union of the three kingdoms that owe allegiance to the British Crown.” As Gladstone plowed ahead, Chamberlain argued, again using the American example. Perhaps Britain, like America, should adopt a system of federalism: England, Scotland, and Ireland could each have its own parliament with certain powers, as the American state legislatures did. But it would not do for one nation, Ireland, to become almost independent, while the other two were not. Compromise became impossible. On March 26, 1886, Chamberlain resigned from the government and when the House voted, June 8, on Home Rule, Chamberlain led forty-six Liberal Imperialists into the lobby against the government. The bill failed, the government fell, and the Liberal party was split.
Chamberlain’s action had dire consequences for himself as well as for his party. He was, after Gladstone, the most popular Liberal politician in Britain. Had he supported Gladstone on Home Rule, he would have succeeded to the leadership of the party and, one day, to the Premiership. As leader of a splinter faction, siding often with the Conservatives, he threw that chance away. Chamberlain never tried to reinstate himself. On the contrary, to the amazement and outrage of his former friends, he turned all his oratorical artillery against Gladstone and the Liberals. “It was unthinkable,”21 wrote the journalist J. L. Garvin, describing the Liberal view of this apostasy. “Weapons made in their own arsenal, talents so obviously designed for the destruction of their opponents, a disposition so obviously Radical, a habit of speech so clearly intended for the chastening of dukes and Tories; that all this should be taken and placed at the disposition of the Tory Party was unheard of, impossible.” He was accused of betraying the cause of the people for the society of duchesses. He was compared, unfavorably, to Judas: “Judas, after betraying his Master,22 did not attend public meetings; he did not revile his associates... he did not go swaggering about Judea saying he had now joined the gentlement of Jerusalem. No, Judas was contrite; he was ashamed; he went out and hanged himself.” Irish members of the Commons stared at his infuriating monocle and orchid and screamed “Traitor!”23 and “Judas!” whenever he rose to speak. Once, when Chamberlain was firing directly at Gladstone, a mass of enraged Irishmen charged him from their benches. Fists flew, hats toppled, and Chamberlain was quite unmoved. To him, politics was a kind of warfare; beliefs must always be passionate; there must be “no fraternizing24 in the trenches and no wandering about in no-man’s land.”
Chamberlain was out of office for almost ten years, 1885–1895. As the Prime Ministership was beyond his grasp, he was resolved to make the best of second-best and use his leverage to compel the Conservative Party to take on his own Radical domestic program. He was technically still a Liberal; he and his followers remained on the Liberal benches, but gave their support on most issues to the Tories. In return, they demanded and received Tory backing for their proposals. In 1891, Lord Salisbury’s government passed a law which had been one of Chamberlain’s lifelong objectives: free education for all children in the United Kingdom. That same year, Chamberlain introduced for the first time in the British Parliament a bill establishing old-age pensions.
During his years of political loneliness, Chamberlain’s private loneliness came to an end, a circumstance for which Lord Salisbury was indirectly responsible. In August 1887, the Prime Minister asked Chamberlain to lead a British delegation to Washington to attempt to settle a fishery dispute involving American fishing boats seized and confiscated in Canadian waters. Chamberlain, gloomy and restless, agreed on the day he was asked. He spent three months in the American capital, where he became a social favorite, dined frequently with President Cleveland, and concluded a treaty which pleased everyone. One night, at a reception in his honor at the British Embassy, the visiting Englishman was introduced to Mary Endicott, the daughter of Cleveland’s Secretary of War. Once the presentations were over, he abandoned everyone else in the room and spent the evening talking to Miss Endicott. That night in his hotel, he sat for hours by an open window, smoking his cigar. Mary Endicott was twenty-three; he was fifty-one. He reached a conclusion. Miss Endicott accepted his proposal. When he sailed for England, Chamberlain wore a red rose instead of an orchid in his buttonhole.
The city of Birmingham greeted the young American bride: “Dear lady, welcome home.”25 Queen Victoria, after their first meeting, entered in her journal: “Mrs. Chamberlain is very pretty26 and young-looking and is very lady-like with a nice, frank, open manner.” (A few years later, the Queen wrote: “Mrs. Chamberlain looked lovely27 and was as charming as ever.”) Lord Salisbury, according to his biographer, “was always ready to discuss politics”28 with Mrs. Chamberlain. More important, the youthful stepmother captured the affection of his children. “She unlocked his heart29 and we were able to enter in as never before,” one of his children said later. “She brought my children nearer30 to me,” Chamberlain acknowledged.
In 1892, Chamberlain’s son Austen, twenty-nine, entered the House of Commons. A year later, wearing a monocle like his father, Austen gave his maiden speech. Gladstone, Prime Minister for the last time, rose to congratulate the son of his former lieutenant and current bitter enemy, observing that the speech and its accomplished delivery “must have been dear and refreshing31 to a father’s heart.” Chamberlain bowed low to the old man and those nearby said that they had never seen Joseph Chamberlain so moved.
Beyond politics, Chamberlain cared only for family and home. He had no interest in sports, played neither golf nor tennis, never hunted or went yachting. His days at Highbury, his house near Birmingham, were largely devoted to reading and raising orchids. He extended his greenhouses again and again and loved to pace the long glass corridors where his exotic plants stood in multicolored ranks. He experimented, crossing hues and sizes, trying always for something new and remarkable, which, when achieved, found its place in his lapel.
The main business of Chamberlain’s life was politics. By the 1890s he had linked all the major themes of his life: Democracy, Radical Social Reform, and Empire. The package made a powerful appeal to the British people. When the new anti-Home Rule coalition of Conservatives and Radical Liberals gave itself the party label of “Unionist,” Chamberlain declared that he was “proud to call myself a Unionist32... believing it is a wider and nobler title than that either of Conservative or Liberal, since it includes both of them—since it includes all men who are determined to maintain an undivided Empire and who are ready to promote the welfare and union, not of one class, but of all classes of the community.” Chamberlain’s concept of Empire went beyond his refusal to see Ireland break the integrity of the United Kingdom. He was thinking of a global bond, linguistic, cultural, political, and commercial. This theme, addressed to a Toronto audience during his North American visit in 1887, had stirred his listeners to “frenzied enthusiasm.”33 “I am an Englishman,”34 he said. “I am proud of the old country from which I came.... But I should think our patriotism was warped and stunted indeed if it did not embrace the Greater Britain beyond the seas—the young and vigorous nations carrying everywhere a knowledge of the English tongue and English love of liberty and law. With these feelings, I refuse to speak or think of the United States as a foreign nation. They are our flesh and blood.... Our past is theirs. Their future is ours.... Their forefathers sleep in our churchyards.... It may yet be that the federation of Canada may be the lamp lighting our path to the federation of the British Empire. If it is a dream—it may be only the imagination of an enthusiast—it is a grand idea.... Let us do all in our power to promote it and enlarge the relations and goodwill which ought to exist between the sons of England throughout the world and the old folks at home.”
Chamberlain’s interest in foreign affairs had evolved as his role in government broadened. In 1878, after only two years in the Commons, he warned his countrymen of the heavy burden of Splendid Isolation: “Already the weary Titan35 staggers under the too vast orb of her fate.” In 1883, he asked Morley for help in defining a Radical position on such matters as National Defense, the Eastern Question, and Belgium. In 1884, Chamberlain, then President of the Board of Trade, had called on Herbert Bismarck in London to express his thanks for German support of the British role in Egypt. “Prince Bismarck,”36 he had told Herbert, “has rendered us such great services that I only wish he could be convinced that towards no power are we so glad to be friendly as towards Germany. Without Germany’s attitude, we would have fallen into great difficulties.” Forwarding this message to his father, Herbert described Chamberlain as “this incarnate representative37 of the commercial class of Free Trade,” who, at that moment, was “the most influential of English ministers.” Chamberlain’s gratitude had limits. When the Chancellor’s tone turned rude, Chamberlain had bristled. “I don’t like to be cheeked38 by Bismarck or anyone else,” he had written to his friend Sir Charles Dilke, the Liberal Under Secretary at the Foreign Office. “I should let Bismarck know that if he is finally resolved to be unfriendly, we accept the position and will pay him out whenever the opportunity arises.”
Chamberlain’s decision to accept the Colonial Office when the Unionist government took power in July 1895 was a surprise; it seemed beneath his talents as well as his claim on the Prime Minister. Chamberlain felt differently. He had told Mary in 1887 that, although he might never hold office again, if the opportunity came he would like the Colonial Office, where he “saw work to be done.”39 As Colonial Secretary, he became responsible for over 10 million square miles—one fifth of the land surface of the globe—inhabited by 50 million people. Chamberlain’s intention was to bind all these immense spaces and varied peoples closer to the crown. He thought that a good start had been made—“I believe that the British race40 is the greatest of the governing races that the world has ever seen”—but that there was more to be done—“It is not enough to occupy41 great spaces of the world’s surface unless you can make the best of them. It is the duty of a landlord to develop his estate.”
In the first six months of his administration, the new Colonial Secretary’s Imperial dreams were brusquely overtaken by international events. When Leander Starr Jameson launched his quixotic raid into the Transvaal and the Kaiser telegraphed his congratulations to the President of the Boer Republic, the Colonial Secretary was indignant. He urged that Britain, beset on all sides, assert itself forcibly. “My dear Salisbury,”42 he wrote four days after Kruger’s receipt of the telegram, “I think that what is called an ‘Act of Vigor’ is required to soothe the wounded vanity of the nation. It does not much matter which of our numerous foes we defy, but we ought to defy someone.” Chamberlain suggested a “strongly worded dispatch to Germany... declaring that we will not tolerate any interference in the Transvaal” and “an ostentatious order43 to commission more ships of war.”
When these crises had passed, Chamberlain drew a worried conclusion: Britain, when challenged, had no friends. No help had been expected from France or Russia. But the Transvaal affair had brought confrontation with a power which Britain had reckoned amiable: Germany. Speaking to the Canada Club in March 1896, Chamberlain told his audience: “The shadow of war44 did darken the horizon” in recent months. The cause, he said, was the “isolation of the United Kingdom.”
British colonial secretaries did not normally speak authoritatively on foreign policy. Two factors made it possible in this instance: the increasing overlap of responsibility between the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office, and Lord Salisbury’s willingness to cede power in certain areas to his strong-minded and energetic colleague, Joseph Chamberlain. Historically, the Foreign Secretary’s task was to manage Britain’s relations with foreign powers while the Colonial Secretary’s duty was to administer Britain’s colonial empire. Now, interlocking disputes involving British colonies and foreign powers having arisen, both government departments were necessarily responsible. Questions about southern Africa, West Africa, Egypt, and the Far East arrived on the desks of both Cabinet ministers. Chamberlain, as Minister responsible for Hong Kong, was directly concerned with British policy in China. The Crown Colony handled more trade than the port of Liverpool. The impact of this trade on Britain’s economy was suggested by a letter from the Duke of Devonshire to Eckardstein in March 1898: “If the panic45 that has seized the Lancashire cotton industry as to its Chinese markets goes on in this way, we shall soon have the greater part of the mills stopped and their hands out of work.” Salisbury, despite this urgency, was little inclined to step forward in colonial disputes. His nature and experience equipped him to deal with the finely tuned Bismarckian system of quiet diplomacy and private understandings. To Salisbury, problems outside Europe were secondary; in most of these cases, he was content that Chamberlain, who had so much more vigor than he, take the lead.
As early as May 1897, Count Hatzfeldt was reporting to Chancellor Hohenlohe that “Chamberlain has rather risen46 above Lord Salisbury’s head.” The Kaiser subsequently referred to the “two-headed administration”47 in Britain and declared that “Chamberlain has Salisbury48 completely in his pocket.” This was not true; final decisions were always the Prime Minister’s. Chamberlain’s letters to Salisbury were forceful, but always respectful. Salisbury’s replies acknowledged the strength of Chamberlain’s arguments, but wondered whether his good ideas could be achieved.
In the weeks following the Jameson Raid and the Kruger Telegram, Chamberlain, believing that the day was past when Britain could survive alone, forcefully stated his opposition to isolation. Salisbury, fearful of the risks of entanglement, declaring England had no history of peacetime military alliances, insisted on isolation. Queen Victoria, alarmed, wrote to the Prime Minister: “Affairs now are so different49 from what they used to be that the Queen cannot help feeling that our isolation is dangerous.” Salisbury attempted to guide her back to his viewpoint. “Isolation is much less dangerous50 than the danger of being dragged into wars which do not concern us.... It is almost impossible for an English Government to enter into... an alliance... because when the crisis came, and the decision of peace or war had to be taken, the Parliament and people would not be guided... by the fact that the Government had some years before signed a secret agreement to go to war, but entirely by the cause for which it was proposed to go to war and their interests and feelings in respect to it. Their fury would be extreme when they discovered that their Ministry had tried to pledge them secretly beforehand.”
Most Britons agreed with Lord Salisbury, and the glories of the Diamond Jubilee in 1897 seemed to confirm this viewpoint. With Dominion premiers and native princes gathering in London, with crowds flocking to Portsmouth to see the lines of anchored warships stretching into the Solent haze, the Empire seemed invulnerable. It was not until autumn of that year that events gave fresh strength to Chamberlain’s argument that—in the queen’s words—“isolation is dangerous.”
These events occurred in China, where the Manchu Empire was in a state of decay. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain had controlled Hong Kong and the trade of South China and the Yangtze Valley. France had acquired Indo-China; Portugal had taken Macao. Late in 1897, China lost additional territories. A German naval squadron seized Tsingtao and the Shantung peninsula. Three weeks later, a Russian squadron appeared at Port Arthur on the other side of the Yellow Sea. Two thousand Russian marines landed and raised the Russian imperial flag. Russian pressure on Peking intensified. In March 1898, the St. Petersburg government announced that it had obtained a twenty-five-year lease on Port Arthur and the right to build a railway across Manchuria to the Pacific.
Chamberlain watched these developments with alarm. The Russian advance into North China, threatening Britain’s traditional interest in the center and the south, coming so soon after the triumph of the Diamond Jubilee, seemed a special humiliation. Talk in Europe attributed Britain’s declining influence in China to a decay in national character. Chamberlain wrote to Salisbury that “public opinion51... [will be] expecting some sensational action on our part.” Salisbury replied, “I agree with you52 that ‘the public’ will require some territorial or cartographic consolation in China. It will not be useful and will be expensive, but as a matter of pure sentiment we shall have to do it.” As Chamberlain had predicted and Salisbury agreed, the English public—most noisily the penny press—demanded action: the Russian menace to China must be confronted; why did the government not act?
In fact, the Cabinet, meeting at the end of March 1898, did not know what to do. Lord Salisbury was ill, recuperating at his villa on the Riviera. Arthur Balfour, substituting for his uncle at the Foreign Office, handled day-to-day problems, but was unprepared to initiate new policies. Chamberlain, determined to stop the Russians, stepped into the vacuum. “It is not the question53 of a single port in China—that is a very small matter,” he told a public meeting. “It is not the question of a single province. It is a question of the whole fate of the Chinese Empire and our interests in China are so great, our proportion of the trade so enormous... that I feel no more vital question has ever been presented for the decision of a Government.... If the policy of isolation, which has hitherto been the policy of this country, is to be maintained in the future, then the fate of the Chinese Empire may be, probably will be, hereafter decided without reference to our wishes and in defiance of our interests.” British sea power alone, he argued, could not halt Russian expansion in Asia. A concert of powers was needed, or, if a concert was impossible, then a single, powerful ally. In Chamberlain’s view, that ally was Germany, which could put pressure on the Russian frontier in Europe—indeed, this was the only power the Russians feared. That month, March, as the Cabinet wrestled with the problem of Russian encroachment on China, the Colonial Secretary resolved to try for an alliance with the German Empire.
Chamberlain’s effort, essentially unsupported by his Cabinet colleagues, was fervently encouraged and abetted by an ally inside the German Embassy in London. During the 1890s, Baron Hermann von Eckardstein, six feet, five inches tall, was a striking figure. On ceremonial occasions, when he put on the white uniform and winged helmet of a Prussian cuirassier, he looked like a Norse god. Eckardstein had launched his career with a caper. As a lieutenant stationed at the German Ministry in Washington, D.C., he attracted the attention of Count Herbert von Bismarck. At dinner in a Washington restaurant with a group including the Chancellor’s son, Eckardstein had bet his fellow diners that he could reach the street faster than they. They leaped from their chairs and ran down the stairs. Eckardstein calmly jumped out an open window. He sprained his ankle, but won the bet. It was the kind of flamboyant gesture to impress a Bismarck, and the young officer soon found himself posted in London. There, he met and married the daughter of Sir John Blundell Maple, a Conservative M.P. and the richest furniture manufacturer in England. A few years later, Sir John, who had no sons, made his German son-in-law heir to his fortune of two and a half million pounds. Bülow, impressed by Eckardstein’s position in English society, promoted the Baron to First Secretary of the Embassy. Eckardstein was eager to promote friendship between his German homeland and the country in which his qualities had been recognized.
Eckardstein and Chamberlain had met in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1889, after Chamberlain’s marriage to Mary Endicott. Over the years, Eckardstein had observed Chamberlain’s rise, and in 1895 he had reported to Berlin that the Colonial Secretary was “unquestionably the most energetic54 and enterprising personality of the Salisbury Government.” Then, in March 1898, Eckardstein arranged a meeting between Chamberlain and Count Hatzfeldt, the German Ambassador. Hatzfeldt was wary of the former screw manufacturer from Birmingham; he preferred to conduct diplomacy with an aristocrat like Lord Salisbury. Nevertheless, Salisbury had told him that Chamberlain would have the last word on colonial matters.
Ambassador Hatzfeldt faced a difficult task. In Berlin, Tirpitz’ first Navy Bill was before the Reichstag. Passage of the Bill was Kaiser William’s keenest political desire. Until this passage was achieved, relations with England must be managed so that Great Britain could continue to be presented as a threat. On the other hand, because the Royal Navy was so overwhelmingly superior, it did not seem politic to reject the British overture with excessive rudeness. “The English fleet,”55 Bülow wrote to Hatzfeldt, “according to the unanimous estimate of all our naval authorities—I name above all, Admiral Tirpitz—is not merely equal to the combined fleets of any other two Great Powers, but superior.” Tirpitz’ proposal for building the German Fleet warned of years of risk in the face of this superior force. Better, therefore, to manage England prudently, to dangle German friendship in front of Chamberlain, and to pick up what one could in the colonial sphere. Hatzfeldt understood this strategy and assured Berlin that he would impress on Chamberlain that before an Anglo-German rapprochement could be contemplated, the Colonial Secretary “would have to show himself56 responsive on certain colonial questions.”
Chamberlain and the German Ambassador met on March 29. Chamberlain emphasized, and Hatzfeldt agreed, that their conversation must be strictly unofficial. He would, of course, keep Mr. Balfour fully informed and ultimately no concrete step could be taken without the consent of Lord Salisbury. These things said, the Colonial Secretary then told Count Hatzfeldt that he favored a defensive alliance between Great Britain and Germany. On all great international issues, he argued, British and German interests were nearly identical. The Jameson Raid and the Kruger Telegram were aberrations. Britain, he confessed, needed friends: “I admitted57 that the policy of this country for many years had been isolation... [but this] may be changed.” If Germany stood by England now in the Far East, said Chamberlain, she could count on Britain’s help if she were attacked. Hatzfeldt listened carefully and confined his response to asking “if I thought that Parliament58 and the people... would accept the idea of an alliance.”
Hatzfeldt had often heard from Lord Salisbury that Britain’s security lay in isolation and that Parliament would never approve a peacetime alliance. Bülow, receiving Hatzfeldt’s report of the first conversation, raised the same objection. Under the British parliamentary system, any new Cabinet could reverse the policies of its predecessor. It was impossible, therefore, for Great Britain to be a reliable ally. At his next interview with the German ambassador, Chamberlain endeavored to address this issue. It was true, he admitted, that a treaty would have to be approved by the House of Commons. But if Hatzfeldt would look back over English history, he would find no case in which a treaty made by one party in power had been repudiated by its successor. That kind of reversal, he suggested, was more likely in countries where the personality of the monarch was key; Imperial Russia, for example.
From Berlin, Bülow and Holstein, opposed to an English alliance but unwilling to affront Joseph Chamberlain, supplied Hatzfeldt with questions and objections which he could use to keep the powerful English Minister at bay. The Kaiser, reading Hatzfeldt’s accounts, relished dangling a German alliance in front of England, but keeping it always just out of reach. It was satisfying to behold a senior minister of the British government admitting England’s weakness and pleading, even unofficially, for German support. “The Jubilee swindle59 is over!” William wrote in the margin of one of Hatzfeldt’s dispatches. On April 10, the Kaiser reminded the Wilhelmstrasse that he did not want an Anglo-German alliance. “At the same time,”60 he continued, “it is of great importance to keep official sentiment in England favorable to us and hopeful. A friendly-minded England puts another card against Russia in our hands as well as giving us the prospect of winning from England colonial and commercial concessions.... To Count Hatzfeldt’s skillful hands will fall the difficult task of putting off the conclusion of a formal alliance, not by a rejection wounding to English feeling, but so as to manifest a cordial wish for beneficent cooperation.” Meanwhile, William used the well-meaning Eckardstein as a decoy. The baron, hearing from Chamberlain that the talks with Hatzfeldt were mired in German reluctance, rushed back to Germany. On April 9 he had an interview with the Kaiser. For an hour after dinner, Eckardstein and the Emperor walked up and down a terrace. William encouraged the airy dreams of his Anglophile diplomat, and Eckardstein hurried back to London to tell Chamberlain that the Kaiser had “said to me at Homburg61 that an alliance with England would be the best thing in the world. It would secure the peace for fifty years.”
During his third and final interview with Hatzfeldt on April 25, Chamberlain heard nothing about this Imperial vision, only reiteration of the obstacles to an alliance. Perhaps someday, Hatzfeldt said, when feeling in Germany was warmer towards England, a closer relationship could be achieved. In the interim, the Ambassador suggested, nothing would be more helpful to advance that prospect than British colonial concessions. As the Birmingham screw manufacturer listened to the Rhineland aristocrat, his face grew hard. Chamberlain had been in business; he knew when he was being pushed too hard. There would be no buying of a future relationship with Germany by giving up bits of British territory. Instead, the Colonial Secretary swung the game around. Hatzfeldt’s report to Berlin of this conversation contained surprising news: “Mr. Chamberlain...62 [said] that if his idea of a natural alliance with Germany must be renounced, it would be no impossibility for England to arrive at an understanding with Russia or France.... Mr. Chamberlain meant very deliberately to indicate that in case of a definite rejection on our side, England, so far as he has to do with it, will work for an understanding with Russia or France.” In the margin of the dispatch, alongside Hatzfeldt’s mention of an English understanding with Russia or France, the Kaiser wrote, “Impossible!”63
This was the end of Joseph Chamberlain’s first attempt to achieve an Anglo-German alliance. When Lord Salisbury returned from Beaulieu at the end of April, Chamberlain reported in detail what had taken place. The Prime Minister, neither surprised nor unduly distressed, consoled his energetic colleague: “I quite agree with you64 that under the circumstances a closer relation with Germany would be very desirable. But how can we get it?” Chamberlain was disappointed. His first effort had failed; other than Eckardstein, no one in Britain or Germany had supported him. Nevertheless, the unpleasant facts, as he saw them, did not go away. On May 13, 1898, he spoke in Birmingham Town Hall: “Since the Crimean War,65 nearly fifty years ago, the policy of this country has been a policy of strict isolation. We have had no allies. I am afraid we have had no friends.... We stand alone.”
fn1 Austen, born in 1863, was Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1903–1905 and 1919–1921, and Foreign Secretary, 1924–1929. Neville, born in 1869, was Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1923–1924 and 1931–1937. From 1937 to May 1940, he was Prime Minister.