1

For the moment Disraeli possessed a prestige unsurpassed by any statesman of his time. After his death Gladstone in a generous tribute selected the return from Berlin as the apogee of his rival’s career, and applied to him the lines of Virgil:

Aspice ut insignis spoliis Marcellus opimis

Ingreditur, victorque viros supereminet omnes.

Two years earlier Bagehot had said of Disraeli ‘… though he charmed Parliament he never did anything more. He had no influence with the country.’ The comment, doubtfully true even then, certainly could not have been made in the summer of 1878. His fame had spread far and wide throughout the land. He was a national figure, the hero of the hour.

Ought he to have taken his opportunity and held a general election? The idea was discussed in Cabinet on August 10, but rejected. The usage of those days was that Parliament, unless some special reason could be adduced to the contrary, should last into its sixth year and preferably until the completion of its sixth session. But the Parliament of 1874 was only four and a half years old, and the Government’s majority on all issues of importance remained unimpaired. A dissolution would have been hard to justify, the Chief Whip was against it, and there seemed no reason to think that the party’s standing in the country would decline. The general verdict has been that Disraeli missed a golden chance of renewing the Conservatives’ mandate for another six years, but Professor Hanham, whose study is the most recent, argues otherwise.1 While agreeing that a dissolution in 1878 would have been more favourable than in 1880, he doubts whether the Conservatives would have secured an overall majority of more than three or four at the earlier date, and they might even have been in a minority against Liberals and Home Rulers combined. Unemployment had been rising steadily, and the municipal elections that year did not go well for the Conservatives. It is true that by-elections honours were even, three losses and three gains, which was a rather better result than in the preceding four years, when losses outnumbered gains by ten to six. It seems on balance unlikely that Disraeli missed any great opportunity by postponing the election.2

What cannot be doubted is that from then onwards his fortunes began to fail and nothing went well for the Government. To a deepening agricultural and industrial depression were added two serious mishaps abroad, which, the Opposition could argue, stemmed from an over-ambitious imperial policy, the disaster at Isandhlwana and the massacre of Kabul. Disraeli’s personal responsibility for these setbacks was minimal, but luck has always been as much an ingredient of a statesman’s success as skill. During the last year and a half of his administration Disraeli and his colleagues undeniably lacked luck.

The Cabinet did not lack talent. It had largely been reconstructed in the last two years and consisted now of the following:

    First Lord of the Treasury Earl of Beaconsfield*
    Lord Chancellor Earl Cairns*
    Lord President of the Council Duke of Richmond*
    Lord Privy Seal Duke of Northumberland
    Home Secretary R. A. Cross*
    Foreign Secretary Marquis of Salisbury
    Colonial Secretary Sir Michael Hicks Beach
    War Secretary Col. the Hon. F. A. Stanley
    Indian Secretary

Viscount Cranbrook (Gathorne Hardy)

    Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Stafford Northcote*
    First Lord of the Admiralty W. H. Smith
   

President of the Board of Trade

 Viscount Sandon
    Postmaster-General Lord John Manners*

 An Asterisk denotes those who held the same office in 1874.

In effect, Derby, Carnarvon, Malmesbury and Ward Hunt had been replaced, though not always in the exact office, by F. A. Stanley, Hicks Beach, Northumberland and W. H. Smith; and one extra post, the Board of Trade, had been brought into the Cabinet, held by Sandon who was competent, in place of Adderley, created Lord Norton, who was not.3 With two exceptions these changes left the Government stronger, or at any rate no weaker, than it was before. The exceptions were the elevation of Hardy to the Lords, which further weakened the front bench in the House of Commons, and the appointment of the Duke of Northumberland as Lord Privy Seal. That office had given Disraeli much anxiety since Malmesbury’s resignation in 1876. For more than eighteen months he doubled it with his own post in order to preserve the balance of six peers and six commoners, but the Queen feared that too prolonged tenure by him might make the economists demand its suppression. The problem would have been easier if it had not been assumed that the Lord Privy Seal must be in the Lords. Eventually Carnarvon’s resignation released a place for a peer. The choice of the Duke, who was quite undistinguished, caused some amusement, and was attributed – perhaps rightly – to the Prime Minister’s romantic penchant for the great noble houses.

The difficulties which beset Disraeli over India were not solely due to bad luck. He must bear the responsibility of choosing, admittedly after trying many others first, the Viceroy whose disobedience led indirectly to disaster. The fact was that Lytton’s startling elevation from Minister in Lisbon to Viceroy of India went to his head. It is true that he had some virtues. Like Disraeli he was commendably free from any racial prejudice, and he severely punished its worst manifestations in India. He introduced many valuable reforms. He was undoubtedly both clever and industrious. The notion that he was a lazy poetaster, launching witticisms to his parasites, was quite incorrect. He certainly caused much offence at the Viceregal Court by his reckless repartee, but this was quite compatible with hard work. Nor is it true to say that he was a mere yes man to the Prime Minister – another common Liberal charge. On the contrary, it would have been better for all concerned if he had been less rather than more independent of London.

But he was curiously unbalanced in judgement. For example, he stirred even Derby to remonstrance by circulating in the autumn of 1877 a pamphlet denouncing the Government for seeking an alliance with Russia. Since England was then on the verge of war with Russia, his apprehensions seem to have been superfluous. ‘This production is either the result of insanity or intrigue,’ wrote Derby. ‘In the latter point of view I fail to see what he has to get by it: in the former the look out for India is unpleasant.’4 Disraeli on this occasion issued a rebuke, but in general until the Afghan imbroglio disillusioned him he defended Lytton with vigour both to his colleagues and the Queen. He could forgive a great deal in a man whom he believed to have ‘imagination’. ‘We wanted’, he told Salisbury, ‘a man of ambition, imagination, some vanity and much will – and we have got him.’5 Salisbury let this pass at the time, but in a later letter was sceptical. He feared, he said, that Cranbrook trusted Lytton too much. ‘He does not realise sufficiently the gaudy and theatrical ambition which is the Viceroy’s leading passion.’6

The problem of India at this time was Afghanistan, a problem that was itself the by-product of a greater, indeed the one that underlay the whole Eastern crisis, the threat of Russia’s advance in central Asia. It was from Afghanistan that from time immemorial northern conquerors had invaded India. If this mysterious, mountainous, half-savage land fell into the control of an enemy power, it could be a threat to the whole stability of British rule. As early as the 1830s Russian agents established themselves at Kabul, and the first Afghan War (1839–42) was successfully fought in order to oust them. For a long time after that Russia was quiescent. In 1857 a treaty was signed by Lord Dalhousie with the Amir Dost Mohammed, and there was no attempt from the Afghans to interfere with the course of the Indian Mutiny. Yet even this apparently successful piece of diplomacy did not go uncriticized. The great John Lawrence viewed it with misgiving as liable to embroil the Government of India in the dark and bloodthirsty convolutions of Afghan politics. In 1863 Dost Mohammed died and a fierce war of succession ensued. Lawrence, now Viceroy, firmly declined to intervene, and confined himself to recognizing the victor, who, of course, felt no particular gratitude for the gesture.

From the period of the Mutiny or even earlier there had been two opposed schools of thought about the north-west frontier: the advocates of the ‘Forward Policy’, such as Lords Dalhousie and Canning, believed that India would not be secure unless Afghan foreign policy was conducted on advice from Simla; on the other hand, Lawrence and the supporters of ‘Masterly Inactivity’, as it came to be known, regarded the Indus rather than the Hindu Kush as the natural frontier of India, and considered that the barbarous tribes beyond should be left alone unless they showed some signs of attempting to cross it. Lawrence, the only Indian civilian since Warren Hastings to rise to the Viceroyalty, had an immense prestige with the whole Indian administration, and his doctrine became the accepted orthodoxy, especially in Liberal circles. Nor was it in practice challenged by the Conservatives in 1866–8; Lord Mayo, their own nominee as Lawrence’s successor in 1869, made no new departure. He received the victorious Amir Sher Ali, but gave him neither the treaty, subsidy, nor dynastic pledge which he sought.

It was not likely that Disraeli, once in possession of untrammelled power, would be content with a policy of masterly inactivity. As soon as he returned to office in 1874 he began to chafe at the attitude of Lord Northbrook, the Viceroy whom Gladstone had appointed after the murder of Mayo in 1872. Moreover, the situation had changed. It could be argued that Lawrence’s policy was safe and economical only while there was no major hostile power pressing upon the farther frontier of Afghanistan, but that the Russian advance in central Asia made this no longer true. As early as 1870 General Kaufman, the Russian Governor of Turkestan, had entered into friendly negotiations with Sher Ali. The Amir understandably wished to know where he stood with Britain. Once again he asked for a treaty of assistance in case of Russian attack. Even the cautious Northbrook would have agreed to this, but the Duke of Argyll, in one of his last dispatches as Gladstone’s Indian Secretary, refused.

Although the actual moment chosen by Northbrook to resign was inconvenient, both Disraeli and Salisbury welcomed the chance of getting in their own man. Lytton was left in no doubt that masterly inactivity had ceased to be the official policy; his first task would be to persuade the Amir to receive a permanent British mission from which it would be possible to send information and countermine the Russians. For two years he made little progress. Sher Ali was suspicious and Lytton dared not quarrel with him as long as there was any chance of an Anglo-Russian war, for one of the principal plans in such a campaign was an invasion of Asiatic Russia by a British Indian army marching through Afghanistan.7 This scheme, sufficiently crackbrained on the most favourable assumptions, stood no chance at all unless the Amir was ready to help in supplying food, etc., for the troops. But the Amir, convinced that the army massed on his frontier was aimed not at Russia but himself, refused to co-operate.

At last in July 1878 the Viceroy’s opportunity came. A Russian mission under General Stolietov arrived in Kabul despite a formal protest from Sher Ali, and was received by him with full honours. Lytton was determined to compel the Amir to receive a British mission, and not only that, to dismiss the Russians, too. The Russians had repeatedly disclaimed any desire to incorporate Afghanistan into their sphere of interest. Moreover, the Congress of Berlin had ended any danger of a general Anglo-Russian war, and hence any need to be tender towards the Amir’s susceptibilities. Lytton asked for authority from London at the end of July to send a mission. Authority was given on August 3, but the Viceroy was clearly told that the route should be through Kandahar and not via the Khyber Pass. Lytton, however, was determined to take the second route and made his preparations accordingly, throughout August and with much publicity. In London there was considerable discussion whether to treat the matter as a purely Indian affair or at the same time to send a diplomatic protest to St Petersburg.8 At first it was decided to make no representations through the Foreign Office and Cranbrook gave Lytton the impression that this course had been agreed. A few days later Cranbrook changed his mind and pressed the reluctant Salisbury, who regarded such protests as futile, to send a dispatch to St Petersburg. It went on August 19. It is a moot point whether the ministers concerned, Disraeli, Salisbury, and Cranbrook, intended to await an answer before finally authorizing Lytton to send his mission. A month later the first two maintained that they did, and subsequently Cranbrook agreed with them. But if so Cranbrook seems to have acted with remarkable negligence at the time, for he never even told Lytton that the dispatch had been sent, let alone that the mission was not to go before it had been  answered.9 Cranbrook was inattentive and slightly lazy, and his heart was no longer in politics. From mid-August he was on holiday in Scotland, and, although he ‘managed to get some Afghan reading done’10 on Sir John Fowler’s yacht, he was away from his files and more interested in deer-stalking than in India. Nevertheless it seems extraordinary that he should not have mentioned such an important proviso in his letters to the Viceroy, and one cannot help wondering whether all three ministers were not being wise after the event.

For, whether or not Cranbrook was keeping Lytton properly informed, it seems clear that Disraeli, along with Salisbury and Cranbrook, did not appreciate the nature of the Viceroy’s plans until very late in the day. The telegrams which lytton sent during July and August were vague and sketchy; it was not until September 9 that the full details of his instructions to the head of the mission, General Sir Neville Chamberlain, arrived in London. Then for the first time Disraeli realized that Lytton intended to make Sher Ali’s dismissal of General Stolietov’s mission a prior condition of sending his own and reopening Anglo-Afghan negotiations. This was a very different matter from merely sending a British mission, and only justifiable on the ground that a major confrontation with Russia was necessary. To Lytton in India, Stolietov’s presence at Kabul might seem to warrant such a trial of strength. To Disraeli and Salisbury the issue was not so simple. The decision to send Stolietov had obviously been taken many weeks before he arrived. Might not his presence be a carry-over from an earlier state of affairs, a riposte to the British gesture of bringing Indian troops to the Mediterranean? Was not the decision to protest to St Petersburg – anyway in retrospect, whatever was thought at the time – intended to secure an answer to just this question? Disraeli expressed his alarm at Lytton’s ignorance of the negotiations with Russia.11 The three ministers agreed that Lytton must postpone the dispatch of the mission until the Foreign Office had received an answer.

But Lytton felt himself too far committed to withdraw. He expected Ali to accept the mission; he believed that the Government at heart wanted him to go ahead and was only inhibited by ‘that deformed and abortive offspring of perennial political fornication’, as he elegantly described the British Constitution in a letter to Cranbrook.12 On September 13 Lytton received from London clear orders not to act until a reply had arrived to the dispatch to St Petersburg. This was the first that he had heard of Salisbury’s diplomatic protest. On September 16 he telegraphed Chamberlain to delay for five days. On the 21st, although he still had no authority from the India Office, he ordered Chamberlain to enter Afghanistan. It was an act of double disobedience, for the Khyber Pass route was the one chosen, but Lytton was probably right in thinking that no one would have minded if it had come off. Alas, it did not. The General was turned back at the frontier, a rebuff which made war virtually inevitable, given the considerations of Oriental prestige and ‘face’ which then prevailed. Disraeli was very angry. ‘When V-Roys and Comms-in-Chief disobey orders, they ought to be sure of success in their mutiny’, he wrote to Cranbrook. ‘Lytton by disobeying orders had only secured insult and failure.’13 The Amir’s ‘insolent reply’, as Lytton called it, arrived in London on October 19 and Disraeli was clear that Lytton must be supported. Even Salisbury, who felt far more bitter against the Viceroy, agreed. The Cabinet decided to send a final ultimatum, carefully worded to strengthen the casus belli and at Lytton’s request expiring on November 20.14

In the interval Disraeli made his annual oration at the Lord Mayor’s dinner. The speech with its keynote sentence – ‘The fate of England is in the hands of England’ – was a bold justification of the whole policy that culminated at Berlin and a vigorous onslaught against those who declared that British power was on the wane and that ‘ours will be the lot of Genoa and Venice and Holland’. But to the consternation of his colleagues Disraeli made a reference to India’s north-west frontier as ‘a haphazard and not a scientific frontier’, and hinted that steps would soon be taken to ‘terminate all this inconvenience’. The Opposition was not slow to accuse the Government of planning war against the Afghans in order to rectify the frontier – a charge which was untrue, but stuck none the less.

The Amir made no answer to Lytton’s ultimatum, which was sent on November 2. With its expiry hostilities became inevitable, and Disraeli effectively defended his policy at the necessary autumn session of Parliament on December 11. Fortunately the campaign went well, thanks largely to the brilliant operations of the column commanded by General Roberts. Sher Ali fled to Turkestan, leaving the country in charge of his son, Yakub Khan, whom he had imprisoned for the last five years. The latter, though in reality both weak and shifty, seemed well disposed to Britain. A treaty was signed in May 1879 after months of negotiation, and a mission was installed at Kabul under Sir Louis Cavagnari, an officer as gallant as he was gullible. There was no reaction from Russia. Lytton’s policy seemed for the moment to have been vindicated, and Disraeli gave no hint to the Viceroy that his disobedience had caused such disapproval.

Posterity has correctly judged the Second Afghan War as unnecessary. There is no evidence that Russia harboured any deeplaid plans. The Cabinet was right in regarding Lytton’s instructions to the Chamberlain mission as altogether too high-handed. The blame can be varyingly apportioned between Cranbrook’s slackness and Lytton’s ‘gaudy vanity’. Apart from the initial error of appointing the Viceroy, Disraeli cannot be held seriously responsible. Perhaps, as with the communications which were passing at roughly the same time between Hicks Beach and Frere in South Africa, he ought to have made sure that the men on the spot were fully apprised of the limits within which the Government expected them to work. But this would have required much interference, whereas Disraeli believed in leaving departmental ministers to get on with their job. We must remember, too, that the Congress of Berlin had only ended in the middle of July and that a younger man than the Prime Minister might well have been exhausted by the experience. The truth was that, in an era of slow communications and an ill co-ordinated governmental machine, it was not at all easy to control those high officers of state whom an unkind person once described as ‘prancing proconsuls’. It was traditional to give them a large measure of independence, and the many instances where this policy paid off should be set against the few which ended in trouble.

2

It would be an error to imagine that after the Congress of Berlin the Eastern question went into cold storage. Of course, Disraeli and Salisbury would have liked it to have done so; indeed, in the immediate aftermath they talked as if it had. The more trouble there was in enforcing the settlement with the concomitant danger of renewed hostilities, the easier it would be for the Opposition to belittle their success. As Disraeli observed to both Cranbrook and Salisbury in a slightly different context, the Government would be popular while the country believed that it had secured ‘Peace with Honor … but if they find there is no peace they will be apt to conclude there is also no honour’.15 Unfortunately the Congress had left some very awkward problems behind. The two that most affected England were first the question of Russian evacuation of the Balkans, second the reform of Turkish rule in Asia Minor, which was a corollary of the Cyprus Convention.16

The second was never solved. Even before Salisbury left office he had almost given it up as hopeless. In the summer of 1879 the Sultan dismissed Khaireddin, the ‘liberal’ Grand Vizier and with him went the last remnants of Layard’s influence in Constantinople. Whatever faint chance there was of reform finally evaporated with the Liberal victory in 1880, when Gladstone, by recalling the British military consuls installed in Anatolia, removed the only appeal that might have influenced Abdul Hamid. But this was not the most urgent problem. More pressing by far was the need to get the Russians out of both Bulgarias. They were given nine months’ grace under the treaty, and were due to depart by May 3, 1879. It was clear from the outset that it would be no easy task to induce them to go peacefully. It is impossible to describe here the details of what followed. In any case they belong to Salisbury’s rather than Disraeli’s life. The important point is that throughout the winter of 1878 and nearly the whole of 1879 there seemed at least a possibility of renewed hostilities with Russia. Although the evacuation at last began on May 3 – it should have finished by then – this did not end the danger, and Anglo-Russian relations, largely because of unwarranted suspicions on both sides, remained very bad for the rest of the year. The British Army, as always, except during the two mass wars of the twentieth century, was extremely thin on the ground. The last thing that Disraeli wanted was a remote campaign which would draw troops away from Europe and weaken his ability to threaten Russia. The Afghan War, though unwelcome, was not too bad, for it was fought by the Indian Army on the spot and could be regarded as a hit at Russia anyway. But when yet another disobedient proconsul landed Britain in yet another war, this time as distant from the main stream of events as could well be imagined and when, to cap everything, it opened with a major disaster, Disraeli’s sang-froid deserted him. If he behaved in a manner which for him was quite abnormally unjust and undignified, pardonable irritation must be the only excuse.

The war which so gravely disturbed Disraeli’s calculations broke out in South Africa.17 It was the first occasion when the troubles of this unhappy land seriously impinged upon English politics, the beginning of a long series which has not ended yet. On the whole, Disraeli had taken little interest in the colonies. His much quoted remark that they were ‘millstones round our neck’ may perhaps be discounted as an outburst of petulance, but it remains true that, apart from some compressed and prescient observations in the Crystal Palace speech, he said very little about them. When he entered office in 1874 he was quite content to leave colonial policy to Carnarvon, just as he left social reform to Cross. Carnarvon had a high reputation in these matters. It was under his auspices that the federation of Canada had been achieved in the previous Conservative administration. Unfortunately, as so often occurs with statesmen, he took this successful measure as a precedent for solving a problem superficially similar but actually quite different. If federation worked in Canada, he argued, why should it not work in South Africa, where there also existed two sets of white colonists with different languages and nationalities?

The important difference was that the colonists in Canada wanted federation, whereas only a small minority of the English, and virtually none of the Boers favoured it in South Africa. It is true that the objective case for South African federation was extremely strong. There seemed no other satisfactory way of presenting a firm front to the ever-present menace of a Kaffir war. But the Boer republics did not owe even a nominal allegiance to the British Crown; and Cape Colony, which did, disliked the idea of sharing the expense of native policy with less affluent neighbours. It must be remembered that the gold and diamond discoveries, destined to make the Transvaal one of the richest countries in the world, still lay in the future. However, Carnarvon plunged in with doctrinaire enthusiasm. He indited an unanswerable dispatch which merely annoyed the colonists. He sent out his friend, the historian Froude, who, on two successive visits in 1874–5 preached federation with all the cocksure confidence of the academic mind, but gained no converts and merely misled the Colonial Secretary. Then Carnarvon summoned a conference in London which was cut by most of the people who mattered. Disraeli, though in principle favouring federation, was far from pleased with Froude’s mission. Monty Corry echoed his master’s voice, if somewhat ungrammatically, when he wrote to Ponsonby a good deal later on May 13, 1878:

By then much had happened. In 1876 the Boers of the Transvaal had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Chief Secocoeni of the Bapedi. Yet this tribe was less formidable than Cetewayo’s Zulus, who remained by far the greatest threat, though holding their hand for the moment, thanks to the influence which Sir Theophilus Shepstone, Secretary for Native Affairs in Natal, had acquired with them and their King. Convinced that the Boers would now welcome British protection, Carnarvon resolved that federation should begin from the Transvaal instead of the Cape, and sent back Shepstone, who had been in London for the conference, with orders to annex the republic at the first plausible opportunity. At the same time he appointed Sir Bartle Frere to the post of Governor of the Cape Colony and High Commissioner for South Africa. Sir Bartle was one of the leading proconsuls of the day, ex-Governor of Bombay, member of the India Council, and a staunch advocate of ‘forward’ policies. He would not at this stage of his career have accepted an ordinary governorship. His brief was to create a South African federation and to act as its first Governor-General. He expected a free hand in achieving this aim. He arrived in April 1877, just when Shepstone announced from Pretoria the annexation of the Transvaal. There was no resistance, but no enthusiasm. The Boers accepted in sullen silence, and the chance of reconciling them soon evaporated. Treasury stinginess and prolonged delay in settling the constitution denied them both the material benefits and the political liberty which might have made annexation tolerable.

Frere soon saw that federation was not practicable for the moment. Feeling against it was too strong both in the Cape and the Transvaal. His immediate concern was with the native question. Trouble seemed impending from every direction for many reasons. There was a disastrous drought in 1877 and 1878, which inevitably set the tribes on the move to conquer new lands either from each other or the colonists. In August, Frere was involved in the ninth Kaffir War, which ultimately in June 1878 resulted in the pacification of Griqualand. It may be noted in passing that Disraeli was singularly unlucky over the weather in the last years of his administration. While lack of rain contributed to the Zulu War which so greatly damaged his prestige abroad, excess of it, summer after summer, produced the series of bad harvests which aggravated the general economic depression at home. The drought was not the only danger in South Africa. Until Shepstone annexed the Transvaal the Zulus had been looking forward to a war against the Boers, whom they detested with every reason. Now, however, an attack on the Boers meant war with the English, towards whom Cetewayo was on the whole quite well disposed. Why in that case, it might be asked, go to war at all? The answer is that the whole social structure of the Zulu state was geared to that purpose. Cetewayo had revived the traditional system whereby the youth of the nation was conscripted into strictly celibate regiments confined to great military homesteads in the area of the royal Kraal. Marriage was rigidly forbidden until the young warrior had washed his assegai in blood, as the saying went. The strongest of human instincts, therefore, was allied with natural bloodthirstiness in a determination to fight someone somewhere.

At an early stage Frere became convinced that South Africa could not be secure until British paramountcy had been asserted over all the tribes from sea to sea south of the Portuguese colonies, and in particular that the Zulu system must be destroyed before it destroyed the colonists. But the last thing that the Cabinet wanted at the height of the Eastern crisis was a war in South Africa. Probably neither Disraeli nor his colleagues, except Carnarvon, appreciated the significance of appointing Frere, an exponent of expansionism if ever there was one, at precisely the moment when the Government was least ready to take the risks involved. Even Carnarvon, who was less anti-Russian than any of the Cabinet, vetoed hostilities. ‘A native war’, he told Shepstone in January 1878, ‘is just now impossible and you must avoid it.’19 Soon afterwards Carnarvon resigned on the Eastern question. The new Colonial Secretary, Hicks Beach, was a strong anti-Russian, and had no particular knowledge of or interest in his predecessor’s South African plans. The High Commissioner ought to have realized that his own position was bound to be weakened by the change.

But Frere continued to take the line that Britain ‘must be master up to the Portuguese frontier’,20 as he said in a dispatch to Hicks Beach on August 10. Yet, although he issued several warnings about the need to subordinate the Zulus to a British protectorate and although a preventive war was undoubtedly the logical implication of much that he said, he never explicitly stated what his plans were until far too late. In London throughout the summer Hicks Beach appeared to agree with all Frere’s objectives, but he either ignored or failed to see that they could hardly be achieved without war. If Frere deserves blame for not spelling out his own true intentions, the Cabinet is no less to blame for never asking him categorically to do so. A further difficulty was slowness of communication. There was no cable to Cape Town, the nearest point for telegrams being S Vincent in the Cape Verde Islands, to which they had to be sent by steamer. The fastest telegram on record took sixteen days to reach London. Letters took at least three weeks, often a month. Gradually the gulf between the Colonial Office and the High Commissioner widened. By the autumn it had become unbridgeable.

Disraeli had paid little attention to the South African situation, but in September the imminence of war with Afghanistan caused him to sit up and take notice. On September 28 he wrote to Lady Bradford

… if anything annoys me more than another, it is our Cape affairs, where every day brings forth a new blunder of Twitters.21 

The man he swore by was Sir T. Shepstone, whom he looked upon as heaven-born for the object in view. We sent him out entirely for Twitters’ sake, and he has managed to quarrel with Eng., Dutch, and Zulus; and now he is obliged to be recalled, but not before he has brought on, I fear, a new war. Froude was bad enough and has cost us a million; this will be worse. So much for Twitters …22

Disraeli’s apprehensions were correct. A visit to Pietermaritzburg at the end of September convinced Frere that, unless he broke the Zulu military power, peace in South Africa could never be secured. On September 30 he sent a dispatch to Hicks Beach asking for reinforcements, and at last specifically stated: ‘… the peace of South Africa for many years to come seems to me to depend on your taking steps to put a final end to Zulu pretensions.’ The Cabinet was dismayed at this prospect. An Afghan war now seemed certain, and Anglo-Russian relations were as bad as ever. Hicks Beach accordingly refused to send reinforcements and informed Frere of the Cabinet’s belief that ‘by meeting the Zulus in a spirit of forbearance and reasonable compromise, it will be possible to avoid the very serious evil of a war with Cetewayo’. Frere received this advice on November 4th with consternation. He realized now for the first time the extent of the divergence between him and the Colonial Office, but the fact did not deter him from pressing on with preparations for war.

On November 7 Hicks Beach sent a letter specifically forbidding war. It did not reach Pietermaritzburg till December 13, but a telegraphed summary arrived on November 30. On December 11 Frere issued an ultimatum to Cetewayo, which was certain to, and intended to, start a war. It demanded abolition of the ban on marriage in the Zulu army and a British veto on mobilization, conditions Cetewayo was bound to refuse. Meanwhile the Cabinet had changed its mind on reinforcements, hearing that the request was backed by Lord Chelmsford, son of Disraeli’s former bête noire, commanding in Natal. On November 20 it was decided to send them, but on strict condition that they were used for defensive purposes only. Frere was in no hurry to tell the Cabinet about the ultimatum. He did not send the text for another five days, and it arrived in London on January 2, nine days before the ultimatum expired.

The war was, therefore, emphatically Frere’s war. Whether or not he was right depends upon something which will never now be known for certain, the exact intentions of Cetewayo; but there can be no question that Frere consciously disobeyed instructions. Like Lytton, he would have been forgiven if he had been successful. Unhappily he was not, and the war opened with a major disaster. On January 22, 1879, a Zulu impi or army of 20,000 men, moving with extraordinary speed and secrecy, utterly destroyed the force of some 1,200 men, defending Chelmsford’s temporary base camp at Isandhlwana. No proper laager had been formed, and no trenches dug, despite the warnings given by none other than Paul Kruger, the future President of the Transvaal. It is fair to add that scarcely anyone realized how far and fast a Zulu impi could travel without a sign of activity under the very noses of British scouts, and that the camp was only a temporary one, to be moved as soon as Chelmsford and the advance guard of his column had reconnoitred their route.23  The news of the disaster reached London on February 12.

Whatever the excuses, the fact of defeat was undoubted. Disraeli, who reasonably believed that success alone could warrant insubordination, was at first almost prostrated by the blow, and when he recovered became extremely angry. Chelmsford at once requested further reinforcements and could not be refused, but Disraeli considered that his whole foreign policy was thrown into jeopardy by this inopportune call on British reserves, while the cost was all too likely to damage the national finances, already in an unsatisfactory state because of the economic and agricultural depression. Disraeli’s health suffered a relapse, probably psychosomatic, and he was sunk in a mood of depression and irritation for several weeks. Nor was he consoled by any quick reversal of fortune. Once bitten, Chelmsford proceeded with extreme caution, and the campaign seemed to be bogged down in a morass of sloth and indecision. Moreover, there was at least one further reverse, militarily insignificant, but looming large in the public eye.

Among those who went out with the reinforcements was Louis Napoleon’s son, the Prince Imperial, who had been trained at Woolwich and was keen to volunteer for some fighting. With the aid of the Duke of Cambridge the matter was arranged over Disraeli’s head by the Queen and the Empress Eugenie. He did not approve.

I am quite mystified about that little abortion, the Prince Imperial [he wrote to Salisbury on February 28]. I thought we had agreed not to sanction his adventure? Instead of that he has royal audiences previous to departure, is reported to be a future staff officer and is attended to the station by Whiskerandos24  himself, the very general who was to conquer Constantinople.

I have to go to Windsor tomorrow after the Cabinet and as I have not seen our Royal Mistress for three months shall have to touch on every point. What am I to say on this? H.M. knows my little sympathy with the Buonapartes …25

Salisbury agreed, but it was too late to do anything. Neither of them could have foreseen what happened. On June 1 the Prince on a reconnaissance with a few companions was surprised by a volley from an ambush just as they were about to saddle up for the ride home. No one was hit, but the Prince was unable to mount his badly frightened horse. The others rode off, apparently not realizing what had happened. When they found that he was missing they returned, only to discover his body speared to death by Zulu assegais. The Queen was greatly distressed at the news, which indeed caused a further slump in the Government’s prestige. There were complications, too, about the funeral, which was celebrated with a degree of pomp considered excessive by Disraeli in view of the fact that the Prince was only a pretender to the French throne, indeed one of several. ‘Nothing cd be more injudicious than the whole affair,’ he told Lady Chesterfield.

The defeat of Isandhlwana caused an outcry in England for the supersession of both Frere and Chelmsford. There was something to be said for bowing to the storm and recalling them at the earliest moment. There was more to be said, as an alternative, for backing them to the full and allowing them to redeem their blunder, if such it was. But there was nothing to be said for what Disraeli actually did. He persuaded the Cabinet to leave Frere in charge for the moment, but to send a dispatch which sharply reprimanded him and yet said at the same time that they had ‘no desire to withdraw in the present crisis of affairs the confidence hitherto reposed in you’. As the dispatch was published, it is surprising that Frere did not resign. This double-faced document gave Sir William Harcourt an enjoyable opening in the House of Commons. He read out an imaginary letter from Hicks Beach. ‘Dear Sir Bartle Frere. I cannot think you are right. Indeed I think you are very wrong; but after all you know a great deal better than I do. I hope you won’t do what you are going to do; but if you do I hope it will turn out well.’

The lack of progress in the campaign brought about renewed pressure on Disraeli in April, and he was greatly annoyed by Sir Bartle Frere’s cool vindication of himself in his dispatches home. ‘Sir B.F. who ought to be impeached writes always as if he were quite unconscious of having done anything wrong’, he told Lady Chesterfield on June 28. Before then he had taken another step against Frere and Chelmsford. On May 28 a telegram was sent to Chelmsford informing him that Sir Garnet Wolseley was coming out as High Commissioner and Commander-in-Chief in Natal, Transvaal and Zululand with plenary powers, civil and military. Chelmsford was to subordinate his plans to the new Commander-in-Chief, and Frere’s territory would henceforth be confined to Cape Colony, where there was nothing of any importance to do. It is certain that Disraeli meant to recall Chelmsford and probable that he expected Frere to resign, but once again that tough proconsul stayed on from a strong sense of duty, although it would have been better to leave after such a rebuff. The telegram arrived too late to stop Chelmsford from implementing his own plans to conquer Zululand. At last success attended his efforts, and on July 4 at Ulundi he finally crushed the power of Cetewayo, ignoring the orders sent to him by Wolseley two days earlier. Wiser than Frere, he resigned immediately afterwards.

Disraeli’s treatment of Frere and Chelmsford caused one of his few serious differences with Queen Victoria. She considered that insufficient allowance had been made for their difficulties and that the Government ought not to supersede them in the middle of the campaign. Moreover, she strongly disapproved of the choice of Sir Garnet Wolseley, who as a Liberal and a supporter of Cardwell’s reforms, was anathema to her cousin the Duke of Cambridge. ‘The Horse Guards are furious, the Princes all raging, and every mediocrity as jealous as if we had prevented him from conquering the world’, wrote Disraeli to Lady Chesterfield on the day of the decision, and three days later;

Disraeli was under no delusions about Wolseley. Writing to the Queen at the end of August, he calmly remarked: ‘It is quite true that Wolseley is an egotist and a braggart. So was Nelson.’27 In general no man was a stauncher adherent than Disraeli of the practice of making political appointments in every sphere, but he admired Wolseley and there was no plausible ‘Conservative’ soldier available, Lord Napier being too old, and Roberts being in India. He was adamant with the Queen, who at last said that she ‘would sanction the proposal submitted if her warnings are disregarded but she would not approve it’.28

This was not the end of his difficulties with his royal mistress. When Chelmsford returned to England the popular view which the Queen so often personified was that Ulundi had obliterated Isandhlwana, and that he should be given a victor’s honours. She pressed Disraeli to invite him to Hughenden at the end of August, Disraeli regarded this as the last straw and riposted with what Ponsonby described to the Queen as ‘a tremendous indictment’. Disraeli wrote inter alia:

He mixes up Lord Chelmsford in no small degree with the policy of the unhappily precipitated Zulu War, the evil consequences of which to this country have been incalculable. Had it not taken place your Majesty would be Dictatress of Europe; the Sultan would be in military possession of the line of the Balkans; the Egyptian trouble would never have occurred; and the Grecian question would have been settled in unison with our views.

Lord Beaconsfield charges Lord Chelmsford with having invaded Zululand ‘avec un coeur léger’, with no adequate knowledge of the country he was attacking, and no precaution or preparation. A dreadful disaster occurred in consequence, and then Lord Chelmsford became panic-struck; appealed to yr Majesty’s Govt. practically for reinforcements, and found himself at the head of 20,000 of yr Majesty’s troops in order to reduce a country not larger than Yorkshire … and had he not been furtively apprised by telegraph that he was about to be superseded, Lord Chelmsford would probably never have advanced to Ulundi. His retreat from that post was his last and crowning mistake, and the allegation that he was instructed to do so by Sir G. Wolseley has been investigated by Lord Beaconsfield and found to be without foundation.’29

Ponsonby minuted to the Queen that he did not himself agree with this tirade. ‘But Lord Beaconsfield could not have written this had his mind not been convinced of what he says; and his words therefore deserve all attention.’ He persuaded her to tone down her counterblast and omit an accusation that Wolseley had sent home ‘all the best officers he can in order to curry favour with the Press and the H. of C.’30 Even so, she wrote a very strong letter.31 But although the correspondence was prolonged she made no impression on Disraeli. He probably exaggerated the harm done by the Zulu War and he was certainly harsh to Chelmsford, who was in a sense less to blame than Frere. But Chelmsford was there and Frere was not. Ponsonby commented to the Queen:

Lord Beaconsfield has always been impatient of ill success and this Zulu War has interfered so seriously with his European action that it is not surprising that he should be so bitter about it. But he makes no allowance for the difficulty of South African campaigns and rather unfairly attributes every disaster to the shortcomings of the General.32

Disraeli invited Redvers Buller and Sir Evelyn Wood, two other prominent soldiers in the campaign, to Hughenden, but he refused to ask Chelmsford. The most that he would accord was a formal interview at Downing Street.

His anger with Chelmsford is understandable and no doubt Ponsonby was right about the reason. Nevertheless Disraeli’s dealings with Frere and Chelmsford constitute one of the least creditable episodes in his Premiership. He ought in the summer of 1878 to have examined the correspondence between Hicks Beach and Frere more closely, and as Prime Minister he must share some responsibility for the fatal ambiguity of the Government’s attitude. Much worse, when once the disaster of Isandhlwana had occurred he pushed the Cabinet into a double-faced treatment of both the High Commissioner and the Commander-in-Chief, which seems on any view indefensible. He should either have sacked them or backed them. On this rare occasion of divergence from her favourite Prime Minister the Queen was in the right.

3

Scarcely had the evil consequences of the Zulu War begun to die away than a fresh disaster occurred in the field of ‘forward policy’. On September 3 Sir Louis Cavagnari and his entire staff were slaughtered by mutinous Afghan soldiers in Kabul. He appears to have had no inkling of trouble, although there had been some suspicious episodes, and the tragedy came as a complete shock to all concerned. The complicity of the Amir was never proved, but on the most favourable view he had shown himself weak, cowardly and unfit to rule. A punitive war was the only answer, and for the second time Roberts conducted a brilliant mountain campaign against the Afghan forces. Disraeli strongly backed Lytton in this new crisis and his attitude was in sharp contrast with his treatment of Frere. The Opposition made the Viceroy a personal target of attack and declared that all the trouble stemmed from his abandonment of Lawrence’s masterly inactivity. Disraeli hit back with vigour and at the Guildhall speech that autumn pronounced a notable panegyric on Lytton. Earlier and in private he was not quite so enthusiastic. Lytton had sent to London an acid commentary in which he cut to pieces the principal officers in the Indian Army except Roberts, and said that one of them, Sir Sam Browne, deserved a court martial. ‘And these are the men whom only a few months or weeks ago he commended for all these distinctions’, Disraeli wrote to Salisbury on September 9. ‘I begin to think he ought to be tried by court martial himself; but I have confidence still in his energy and resource.’33 Fortunately for Lytton there was no Isandhlwana in the Afghan hills. Roberts entered Kabul in triumph on October 13, having crushed all resistance.

*

The Third Afghan War finally determined the Liberals to make the Government’s foreign and imperial policy their main object of attack. Yet Disraeli’s foreign policy since the Congress of Berlin had been by no means unsuccessful. Regarding the destruction of the League of the Three Emperors as one of the principal achievements of Berlin, he had striven hard ever since to prevent its revival. Bismarck was anxious to bring Russia back into the conservative alliance, but the essential prerequisite, an Austro-Russian rapprochement, was twice prevented by British diplomacy. The most authoritative historian of the period regards the years 1878–80 as a struggle, none the less real for being largely concealed, between Disraeli and Bismarck for the leadership in Europe.34 Disraeli certainly believed that if England was to be a great power she must act as if she was one and show herself to the world in that role. Such diplomacy presupposed a degree of intervention and assertiveness that was bound to be detested by the Little Englander element now in the ascendancy in the Liberal party. Moreover, events forced Disraeli and Salisbury to take the lead, quite apart from the question of the Dreikaiserbund. For the burden of forcing Russia to comply with the Berlin treaty fell on Britain; Bismarck was not going to offend Russia more than he could help, and although there was for most purposes an informal Anglo-Austrian front, Andrassy, who had refused a formal British alliance at the height of the crisis, had no intention now of pulling Salisbury’s chestnuts out of the fire. There remained the threat of British warships steaming into the Black Sea, where the Russians had no fleet, and thus defending Turkey by threatening the Ukraine. This was the basis of British foreign policy while the Conservatives remained in office, and it was on the whole effective. By August 1, 1879, not a Russian soldier remained in the Balkan peninsula.

Late in September, Bismarck made a curious démarche to Disraeli which has produced much historical speculation, since the evidence is both incomplete and contradictory. Count Münster, the Ambassador, came to stay at Hughenden on September 26, bearing with him, according to Disraeli’s account, the secret offer of an alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Münster apparently went so far as to assert categorically that ‘Russia is preparing to attack Austria’ – a statement which Bismarck may or may not have believed, but which was certainly untrue. Disraeli, who forwarded long memoranda of the discussion both to the Queen35 and Salisbury, replied cautiously, if his version is correct, and while encouraging further discussion indicated that the difficulty would be relations with France. The conversation, which lasted for an hour before dinner and was resumed afterwards, ended on a note of goodwill, but with no commitments. Münster’s own account to Bismarck36  differs on some important points. According to him, the proposal for an alliance came from Disraeli, and when Münster asked what England would do if Germany was involved in war with Russia because of her support for England and Austria in the Balkans he replied, ‘We will in that case keep France quiet.’ On this Bismarck crossly commented, ‘Is that all?’37 – though it is difficult to see what more he could have expected.

Both Disraeli and Münster, whose letters were to be seen by their respective Sovereigns, may have had reason to attribute the initiative to the other.38 The Queen was not going to approve of England asking for an alliance with Germany, and the Emperor, who in his old-fashioned way still hankered after the traditional dynastic friendship with Russia, was unlikely to welcome an anti-Russian move by Bismarck. Each monarch would find an approach from the other country less unacceptable. A further difficulty in elucidating the story is that Münster’s instructions from the Chancellor on this point were verbal and no written record remains. It is therefore far from clear what Bismarck really wanted. Whatever it was, he soon dropped it. His own negotiations for a military alliance with Austria-Hungary, which were going on simultaneously, came to a successful conclusion on October7. Moreover, during the second half of September he entered into friendly discussions with Saburov, the Russian Ambassador in Berlin, which may have persuaded him that the danger of Russian hostility was unreal. Münster said no more about the alliance and when Salisbury raised it with him at Hatfield he gave the impression that there was less interest on Bismarck’s part.

No more was heard of a proposal elevated by some historians into one of the ‘lost opportunities’ of an Anglo-German rapprochement which might have prevented the First World War. This is very unlikely. Certainly no one of weight in England thought at the time that any particular opportunity had been lost, and Salisbury went out of his way to welcome the Austro-German alliance, calling it in a speech at Manchester ‘Glad tidings of great joy’, to the scandal of Liberal pietists. Both Münster and Disraeli agree in their versions that the question of Anglo-French relations was crucial. Disraeli all his life appreciated the importance of keeping in with France. It was particularly important just then, for early in the year the Khedive of Egypt finally declined into total bankruptcy, and Layard in June after much cajolery induced the Sultan to depose him in favour of his son Tewfik. It was vital for Britain to be on good terms with the French, who held the majority of Egyptian bonds, and to act in concert with the French Government in rehabilitating Egyptian finance. One of Disraeli’s many counts against Frere and Chelmsford was that the Zulu War had weakened his hand at precisely the moment when he wanted to be in a strong bargaining position with the French. In fact, friendly relations did prevail and, in Disraeli’s time at least, dual control worked reasonably well. To have jeopardized good relations with France for the sake of Bismarck’s ambiguous proposals would not have made sense.

Although Bismarck had secured an Austro-German alliance, he was still far from achieving a revived Dreikaiserbund. Disraeli’s policy was successful. Haymerle, who succeeded Andrassy, continued to favour the Anglo-Austrian front against Russia. Bismarck’s position as arbiter of Europe depended on the dissolution of this entente, but it remained intact until the end of Disraeli’s premiership, and the initiative stayed with Britain and Austria-Hungary discreetly supported by France and Italy. Both Russia, and to some extent Germany, remained isolated. But soon after his resignation in April 1880 Disraeli wrote to Queen Victoria:

His fears were justified. In so far as Gladstone’s Government had any clear foreign policy it was based on a vague and virtuous resolve to reverse ‘Beaconsfieldism’ in all its forms. There was no attempt to preserve the accord with Vienna. By September, Haymerle had agreed to join a resuscitated League of the Three Emperors. Among other pledges the new alliance agreed to insist upon Turkey’s refusing to allow the entry of warships into the Straits. Britain’s only effective means of bringing pressure on Russia disappeared, and since Gladstone had withdrawn the military consuls from Anatolia her only means of bringing pressure on the Sultan evaporated, too. Britain no longer had the principal say in the Near East; and in Europe generally the initiative moved from the British Prime minister to the German Chancellor. ‘Beaconsfieldism’ was indeed dead.

Logically Bismarck should have welcomed the result of a general election which substituted a man who played into his hands for a man who thwarted him. In fact, he disliked Gladstone for temperamental reasons almost as much as Disraeli did, and always retained a respect for ‘the old Jew’ mingled with friendly amazement at his ability and sheer effrontery. When Endymion was published at the end of 1880 Bismarck read without offence the portrait of himself as Count Ferrol, and was moved to reminisce among friends about his former rival. ‘It was easy to transact business with him: in a quarter of an hour you knew exactly how you stood with him; the limits to which he was prepared to go were clearly defined, and a rapid summary soon concluded matters … I must say that in spite of his fantastic novel-writing he is a capable statesman …’

1 Elections and Electioneering, 227–9.

2 The notion that he did so in order not to gain an unfair partisan advantage from an issue of foreign policy is too naïve to be taken seriously, although Gathorne Hardy (Memoir, ii, 78) seems to have believed it. Disraeli was made of sterner stuff than that.

3 As a result the Cabinet numbered thirteen instead of the twelve to which Disraeli had for long tried to limit it.

4 Hughenden Papers, Box 113, B/XX/S/1343, October 9, 1877.

5 M. & B., vi, 379, April 1, 1877.

6 Salisbury Papers, Salisbury to Disraeli, October 10, 1878, copy.

7 ibid., Lytton to Salisbury, October 28, November 8, November 30, 1876, May 21, 1877, July 13, 1878.

8 See for a full discussion of this and other aspects of the origins of the Second Afghan War, Maurice Cowling, ‘Lytton, the Cabinet and the Russians, August to November, 1878’, English Historical Review, lxxvi (1961), 60–79.

9 ibid., 66.

10 Gathorne Hardy, ii, 81.

11 M. & B., vi, 380–1, quoting Disraeli to Cranbrook, September 12, 13 and 17, 1878.

12 Quoted, Cowling, 70.

13 M. & B., vi, 382.

14 ibid., 386–8, quoting Disraeli’s account of the meeting to the Queen.

15 ibid., 381, Disraeli to Cranbrook, September 17, 1878. The same phrase is used in a letter to Salisbury.

16 W. N. Medlicott, The Congress of Berlin and After (1938), gives the most authoritative account of diplomatic negotiations, 1878–80.

17 The best account of Isandhlwana, its antecedents and aftermath is Sir Reginald Coupland’s Zulu Battle Piece (1948).

18 M. & B., vi, 419–20.

19 C. W. De Kiewiet, The Imperial Factor in South Africa (1987), 217.

20 J. Martineau, Life of Sir Bartle Frere (2 vols, 1895), ii, 259.

21 Carnarvon’s nickname.

22 Zetland, ii, 189.

23 See Coupland, Zulu Battle Piece, 64–67, for discussion of this question.

24 Presumably Lord Napier.

25 Salisbury Papers, February 28, 1879.

26 M. & B., vi, 433–4.

27 ibid., 435.

28 ibid., 431, May 26, 1879.

29 ibid., 459.

30 Royal Archives, B.61.39, Ponsonby to the Queen, September 1.

31 M. & B., vi, 460.

32 Royal Archives, loc. cit.

33 M. & B., vi, 481.

34 See Professor Medlicott’s essay in Studies in History and Historiography (1961), ed. A. O. Sarkissian, 242–50.

35 M. & B., vi, 486–8.

36 Grosse Politik, iv, 7.

37 ibid., 12.

38 Medlicott, The Congress of Berlin and After, 386–7.

39 Royal Archives, B.64.3, Disraeli to Queen Victoria, June 14, 1880.