17

Fatal Appointments, 1902–1903

LORD SALISBURY HAD referred to Curzon as one of the four satraps of the empire conspicuous for force and intelligence. The three civilian members of this group shared a number of characteristics. Like Curzon, Milner and Cromer were zealous, high-minded, hard-working imperialists, inclined to see themselves as sacrificing their lives in distant corners of the empire without adequate support from an indifferent government at home. Their views of themselves, their work and their compatriots in Britain might be summarized respectively in Kipling’s poems ‘The Pro-Consuls’ (which was inspired by Milner), ‘The White Man’s Burden’ (although this was directed at the United States) and ‘The Islanders’, in which the poet berated his countrymen for their sloth and complacency. Like Kipling, all three remained faithful to the Victorian sense of imperial mission and were similarly disquieted by the laxer but less certain currents of the Edwardian age.

The military member of Salisbury’s quartet had few of the qualities of the other three, and yet in public estimation he outstripped them all. The first hero of the empire was Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, a warrior of stoked and smouldering energies who enjoyed greater fame and reputation than anyone from his profession since the Duke of Wellington. These had been acquired in the Sudan, where he defeated the Dervishes, and in South Africa, where he was more successful as Chief of Staff to Lord Roberts, a better commander, than he was on his own. Even an admiring member of his staff admitted that Kitchener had ‘a very slight knowledge of tactics’ and wisely left the details of a battle to his subordinates.1 He enjoyed a formidable reputation as an organizer, a British Carnot, although this was later tarnished in the First World War and even at the time it puzzled some who worked with him. General Sir Ian Hamilton, his second-in-command against the Boers, believed it was a myth repeated by people who could find no more plausible explanation for his success.2 Other generals nicknamed the conqueror of Khartoum ‘Kitchener of Chaos’ or more simply ‘K of Chaos’ after he and Roberts had mistakenly reformed the regimental transport system in the middle of the South African war.3 He also had a reputation for brutality and looting, but maltreating the Dervishes and allegedly digging up the Mahdi’s skull for use as a desk ornament were forgiven by a public delirious at the avenging of General Gordon. Kitchener’s reaction to revelations of the homosexual activities of Sir Hector MacDonald, a distinguished soldier who had risen from the ranks to command the British forces in Ceylon, illustrates another side of his nature. Whereas Roberts hoped the disgraced general would go to some distant part of the world and be forgotten, Kitchener, who may have been a repressed homosexual himself, wanted him courtmartialled and shot.4 In the end MacDonald shot himself.

Kitchener was adored by a public which saw him as an incarnation of John Bull with the smoke of patriotism pouring out of his nostrils. He looked hearty, direct and honest, but was in fact artistic, devious and unscrupulous. The craggy, impassive exterior concealed an ambitious intriguer who, as Esher observed, became a combination of Juggernaut and Ignatius Loyola in order to achieve a purpose. Milner, who had been as anxious to get him out of South Africa as Cromer had been to remove him from Egypt, thought Kitchener had never been able to distinguish between fighting the Mahdi and fighting his own colleagues and countrymen.5 In spite of this weakness, he attracted the adulation of a number of influential people who were aware that he did not ‘run straight’ but forgave him because they thought he was, or might be, a genuine war hero. Among them was a group of highly intelligent men including Balfour, Esher and Rosebery, as well as Lady Cranborne, the future Marchioness of Salisbury, who worshipped Kitchener and did everything she could to further his career.

Shortly before Curzon left England in 1898, Kitchener told him he wanted to serve on the Subcontinent and even sent a photograph for Mary to ‘remind her of the man who means to take her down to dinner some day in India’. A few months later he called unexpectedly at the India Office and announced his desire to be considered for the post of Military Member of the Viceroy’s Council. Curzon thought he would be more suitable as Commander-in-Chief, a job which did not require as much departmental work or co-operation with colleagues as the military membership. But as soon as the idea became known, several of Curzon’s friends, including two former Viceroys, advised him not to contemplate Kitchener as C-in-C. Lord Lansdowne endorsed the common view that the general was a great organizer, but then proceeded to distrust his judgement, to rank him as an inept commander who had driven the Egyptian army to the point of mutiny, and to ‘shudder at the thought of turning him loose without previous apprenticeship in India, to deal with the native army’.6 Lord Northbrook was even more forthright. Kitchener was intensely unpopular in the army at home, he told Curzon, and had ‘no knowledge whatever of the native army, no tact and no aptitude for civil work’.7 Naturally unreceptive to advice, the current Viceroy ignored the warnings.

Similar alarm was expressed in India. The entire army, reported Collen, the Military Member, was hostile to the appointment of Kitchener, who knew nothing of either India or the Indian soldier, and would offend everybody and turn everything upside down.8 It was not the wisest way to appeal to Curzon, who believed the army in India needed to be turned upside down and who hoped that Kitchener would give it the same sort of treatment that he himself had applied to the administration. The Viceroy wanted the best man available and, compared to the other mediocre candidates, the victor of Omdurman stood out. Curzon claimed to know about Kitchener’s ‘somewhat unlovable temperament’ and realized he could be imperious, stubborn and difficult to get on with. But he believed himself to be now ‘too firmly seated’ to worry about that.9

The man who sanctioned the appointment was St John Brodrick, the War Secretary, who had been very critical of Kitchener in Egypt but later claimed to have made an enormous sacrifice in letting him go to India.10 The Field Marshal’s departure, however, was delayed by the Boer War, and Sir Power Palmer became Acting C-in-C while he was in South Africa. Returning to England in the summer of 1902, Kitchener insisted on taking a holiday, which Curzon suggested should be spent looking for a wife, and did not reach India until November. Punch’s farewell cartoon reflected Brodrick’s feelings by showing Britannia with helmet and trident pointing to Kitchener and saying to the sari-draped India, ‘We can ill spare him; but you see we give you of our best.’

Curzon’s wife and secretary were apprehensive about the potential for friction between two such autocratic and self-willed characters as the Viceroy and the Commander-in-Chief. Mary wrote the newcomer a welcoming letter telling him of her husband’s ‘intense satisfaction’ that he was there and warning him it was ‘the prayer’ of the soldiers that ‘the two giants would fall out’.11 Curzon was impressed by his first meeting with Kitchener and relieved that he no longer had to deal with generals who were ‘phantoms’. The new C-in-C was highly unconventional, he reported, but it was ‘a grand thing to get a man of power, determination and prestige in this country, and when he makes the veteran automatons skip and hop I view the spectacle with sympathetic relish’.12 Curzon was also delighted by his determination to enforce higher standards of behaviour on the British soldier.

Kitchener enjoyed his life in India, especially when he could set off with a band of ADCs and scour remote parts of the frontier – a habit Curzon deplored because the tribesmen became suspicious and nervous when they found the C-in-C in their districts. But he intensely disliked office work and refused to try to understand how the system of departments worked. While he liked to ruminate on schemes to redistribute the frontier garrisons or renumber the native regiments, he was bored by details and let his adoring staff deal with them. His laziness provoked the amazement and admiration of his Military Secretary. ‘It is wonderful’, Colonel Hubert Hamilton told Lady Cranborne, ‘how he gets through his work – 3 or 4 hours a day does it all, and only 5 days a week … He discards all detail on the one hand and, on the other, makes his staff work very hard, and very willingly, at all the bigger questions he takes up.’13

Kitchener’s leisure was spent in pursuits as out of tune with his popular image as flower arranging, interior decorating, collecting plants and porcelain, and designing his servants’ liveries. Aggrieved to find that Snowdon, his house at Simla, was so much smaller than Viceregal Lodge, he grumbled that the Indian Government had ‘no proper feelings’ about how the C-in-C should be lodged.14 After bullying the Finance Department into agreeing to pay for his alterations, he added a hall, a drawing-room, a dining-room and a library; one of the papier mâché ceilings, constructed from files of the Military Department, was a replica of the library ceiling at Hatfield. Similar enlargements were made to his house in Calcutta. Proud as he was of his decorative skills, Kitchener was equally vain as a collector of porcelain. Like his plants, which tended to be ‘annexed’ from neighbouring gardens, the collection demonstrated the acquisitive as well as the artistic side of his nature. Wise hostesses locked up their best pieces because, like royalty, he expected to be given anything he had vocally praised. When this did not happen, he was observed on occasion to pocket it. Mary Curzon was much amused to find herself solicited for her mother’s collection of rare bottles.15

Mary went to great lengths to befriend Kitchener. In her opening letter she hoped they would meet frequently and that he would drop in to play billiards with her husband. Soon she was sending him notes and giving him presents such as gold mustard pots for his birthday. Kitchener appreciated the efforts they both made towards him. ‘Curzon is all one could wish and as kind as possible,’ he reported home after his first few weeks in India. Six months later he wrote that both had been very kind to him and that Curzon was ‘really a first-rate viceroy’.16 Mary came to believe that she was a ‘great friend’ of the C-in-C, a view also held by her husband who afterwards thought that Kitchener had been her devoted admirer and that she had been ‘almost the only solace of his rather lonely life in India’.17 Both of them were misled by the general’s friendship and remained deluded until the end. No doubt Kitchener liked the mustard pots and the dinners and perhaps even the billiards; but there are enough snide comments in his letters and those of his subordinates to show that the friendship meant little to him.

Four months before Kitchener’s arrival in India, Curzon had been warned about his intentions in a letter from an old friend. Meeting the soldier in London, Clinton Dawkins had found him ‘able, energetic, domineering, very little troubled by scruples’ and determined to run ‘the whole show’ in India. Kitchener had told him frankly that he would spend a year looking around, that he would not collide with Curzon, but that he would use ‘the whole of his popularity and prestige to dominate the next viceroy’.18 Lady Edward Cecil reported a similar encounter. ‘I don’t mean to quarrel with Curzon,’ Kitchener had said with an inflexion in his voice ‘to suggest what would be the fate of the next viceroy.’19

Dawkins correctly identified Kitchener’s chief objective as the elimination of the Military Member of the Viceroy’s Council and the assumption of his duties by the C-in-C. Curzon, who did not understand why he was so anxious to destroy a system he had no experience of, was unaware that a senior general had gone to England specifically to prejudice Kitchener against the Military Department. The Adjutant-General, Horace Smith-Dorrien, decided to resign his post early in 1902 because he could no longer tolerate the alleged obstructiveness of the department. Asked to withdraw his resignation by Palmer, Smith-Dorrien agreed on condition he was given leave to go to London to warn Kitchener, who had just arrived from the Cape, how his hands would be tied in India. Taking with him a summary of the department’s perceived misdemeanours, the Adjutant-General showed it to the South African hero, who gasped, ‘Is this the sort of thing I have got to compete with?’20 On arriving at Bombay later in the year, Kitchener found Smith-Dorrien’s views reinforced by Palmer himself, who had just quarrelled with the new Military Member, General Sir Edmund Elles, on a trivial matter; embittered by the row, Palmer told his successor that the department had become too powerful. Kitchener’s reaction was to tell Curzon at his first meeting that, given this state of affairs, he should have come out as Military Member rather than C-in-C. Adding his opinion that the Viceroy’s principal military adviser should be the Commander-in-Chief, he announced his desire to abolish the Military Department. Curzon naturally expressed extreme surprise that a new C-in-C should make such a proposal after having spent three days in India, a point which Kitchener seemed to find reasonable, because he agreed not to raise the matter again until he had gained some experience of the country’s administration.21

The new Commander-in-Chief arrived in India with an exaggerated view of the power of the Military Department which he intended to exaggerate still more to others until he had obtained its abolition. The department was not in fact acquiring new powers but was recovering under Elles some of those it had lost under the gentle and acquiescent regime of General Collen. What had been the most incompetent of government departments when Curzon arrived had greatly improved in the hands of an officer of administrative ability, and was now performing a useful role. The Viceroy was convinced it had not encroached upon the prerogatives of Army Headquarters, which remained immeasurably more powerful. The Commander-in-Chief in India had greater powers than any other military officer of the empire, certainly more than the C-in-C in England, because he was not merely the executive head of the army, responsible for its organization, training, mobilization and campaigning; he was also, as the second-ranking member of the Viceroy’s Council, the equivalent of a senior cabinet minister. The Military Member, whose position was much less prestigious, headed the department which handled the army’s finances and administration, and acted as a second military adviser to the Viceroy. It was this latter function, important at any time but essential when – as in this case – the C-in-C had no experience of India, that infuriated Kitchener and led to his campaign against the Military Department. When I am Commander-in-Chief,’ he had declared in England, ‘nobody is going to have a word in criticism of my proposals, and no department which renders this possible shall exist.’22

Disregarding his promise to Curzon that he would acquire some experience of Indian affairs before embarking on a crusade, Kitchener immediately started a quest for allies by mail. Lady Cranborne was as always an easy convert and could be relied on to preach about the iniquities of the system to the Prime Minister, her husband’s first cousin. Lord Rosebery was also approached and told that the system was just about as bad as it could be, though not quite so bad as at the War Office in London.23 But Kitchener failed to enlist Britain’s most illustrious military figure, Lord Roberts, whose experience of the Indian army had lasted over forty years. It had never been inconvenient, Roberts replied, to have supply and transport run by the Military Department, because they had automatically come under his orders during manoeuvres or when a force took the field. Besides, his inspection tours in the winter and his work at Headquarters and on the Viceroy’s Council during the hot weather had given him enough to do without taking over the functions of the Military Member.24 Kitchener, who was too lazy even to get through the C-in-C’s work properly, was annoyed by the reply but undeterred by its arguments; he continued to press for the abolition of a system he insisted on referring to as ‘dual control’. The phrase, with its implication of divided command and the suggestion that it would lead to hesitation and inefficiency in time of war, convinced many people in England that Kitchener was right. In fact it was a highly misleading description of a system which divided different duties between two men because they were too onerous for one.

In January 1903 Kitchener was so impressed by an article in the Contemporary Review, which advocated the abolition of the Military Department, that he invited its author, Captain Malleson, to India to write the C-in-C’s notes and memoranda. The following month he submitted a formal proposal based on Malleson’s article and told Curzon he wished to clip the wings of the Military Member and reduce him to a position of impotence. The Viceroy strongly deprecated the idea and urged Kitchener to spend a year in India before pulling the system to pieces.25 Once again the C-in-C accepted the advice and once again failed to follow it. Yet while he continued to rail against the existence of the Military Department, his own inexperience tended to demonstrate the case for its retention. When asked by the Secretary of State to recommend the size of the force required to escort a political mission into Tibet, Kitchener and Smith-Dorrien, who had no experience of fighting at Himalayan altitudes, suggested sending 6,000 troops. This absurd number might have been despatched had the Military Department not greatly reduced it. In the end a force of 2,000 men proved adequate to carry out the assignment.

Kitchener’s ‘year’ of cogitation lasted three months, although even during this tranquil season he pursued his grudge against the Military Department and tried to emasculate it by tempting its best officers away with offers of promotion. He then went on a tour of the frontier and on his return in May, without having acquired any further administrative experience since his first proposal, produced a new scheme to place the Military Member under his orders, to house the Military Department under the same roof as Army Headquarters, and to take charge of matters of supply, transport and ordinance. He was so delighted with this document that he thought even the Military Member would be convinced by it. Elles, however, disagreed with each point, and so did Curzon. For the third time in five months the Viceroy advised Kitchener not to persevere with the scheme, which he thought the other members would unanimously oppose, but to wait and find out how the administration really worked. ‘What is at the bottom of it all?’ Curzon asked him during a conversation on the same day, ‘what do you object to? You admit you have no case against the military department from your own experience, and yet you want to destroy it; where does the grievance come in?’ Kitchener replied that he could not tolerate criticism or rejection of his proposals from a subordinate military authority. ‘You may be unable to understand it,’ he added, ‘for it is all a question of military feeling and military discipline.’ Reporting the conversation to Hamilton, Curzon pointed out that Kitchener was aiming at an absolute dictatorship in all military matters for the Commander-in-Chief.26

The procedure of making notes on proposals was common to all departments and areas of the Government. Plans put forward by a Lieutenant-General were noted upon at Army Headquarters, those proposed by a Lieutenant-Governor were minuted by the Government in Simla or Calcutta; even the Viceroy’s views toured the departments and were commented upon. But Curzon was prepared to go far to accommodate the C-in-C and on 21 May he issued orders that Kitchener’s proposals should not be noted upon or criticized by junior officers in the Military Department but should be sent directly to the most senior official, the Secretary. On the same day the C-in-C told Curzon that while a ‘vast majority’ of officers shared his opinions, he had decided, in view of the Viceroy’s opposition, once again to withdraw his proposals. Explaining his decision to Lady Cranborne, he said that on reflection it seemed better to wait a year before inflicting them on the next Viceroy; in the event of Curzon receiving an extension, he would resign his post and return to England. Four days later he changed his mind after hearing from the Viceroy that the Military Department had slightly altered the wording of a confusing and carelessly phrased order while he had been on his frontier tour. Losing his temper, he demanded to know whether Curzon’s view on the issuing of orders could be taken as ‘a final ruling in the matter’. If it was, he added, he must stick to his principles and resign.27

Curzon replied that he had given no ruling but had merely described the existing practice. Kitchener was invited to propose changes to that practice to the Council, which he did, and once again Curzon went far to remove a grievance by creating a new category of Indian army orders to be issued only by the Commander-in-Chief. Writing to Hamilton, the Viceroy could justifiably claim that he had done everything possible to prevent Kitchener’s resignation and remain on good terms with him. To his father he admitted that the C-in-C was ‘a most difficult customer to manage, very impetuous, quite ignorant of India, and impatient of the least control’. Kitchener possessed rigour and energy, but his foolish behaviour showed that he was deficient in both judgement and ability.28

Six weeks later Curzon reported that the atmosphere with Kitchener was much better. Although the C-in-C had ‘splashed about a bit at the beginning’ and made a number of stupid mistakes, he was now seeing his way and ‘acquiring focus’.29 But if Curzon thought his good humour and improved vision indicated a change of attitude, he was mistaken. Knowing that his views would be communicated to the Prime Minister, Kitchener was still writing to Lady Cranborne about resigning. Although he liked India, he told her, it was ‘too heart-breaking to go on seeing inefficiency rampant and fostered in every way’. There was no doubt he should clear out, he went on, and do something else. Could it not be arranged, he asked her, for Lord Cromer to join the Cabinet so that he could have a go at running Egypt?30

Kitchener’s future actions, as he had told Lady Cranborne, depended on whether the Viceroy’s rule was extended beyond the normal term of five years. For some time Curzon had been tempted to emulate Dalhousie by remaining longer to oversee the fulfilment of all his reforms. Cromer, who was the de facto ruler of Egypt for twenty-four years, had suggested as early as 1898 that Curzon should stay on and make India the main work of his life.31 In 1901 the Viceroy told his father he preferred to make a great name for himself in India while he still had the strength rather than wait at home for Lansdowne’s retirement, when he might be too feeble or crippled to take the Foreign Office.32 A year later, despite his rows with the India Council and the Cabinet, he felt he should stay on and cement his work in case a weak or ignorant successor allowed it all to collapse.33 Many reforms were in place and could hardly be undone, but some were in the process of implementation and others were barely started. In the summer of 1902 he began his last major commission of enquiry, yet at the beginning of his fifth year in India he was still waiting for the commission reports on railways, irrigation, the police and the universities that would permit him to initiate legislation he hoped would determine India’s future for the first half of the twentieth century. Many people in India wanted him to stay and complete his reforms, and many friends in England wanted him to return and nurture his career. As usual he was impervious to advice. His mind was dominated by the single thought that to leave after five years would be to leave his job half done.

First among the advisers he spurned was Mary. He had made his name in India, she argued, and no extra years could add to his magnificent reputation. Since he was already in danger of being forgotten as a politician and regarded as a permanent proconsul like Cromer, she had a ‘burning eagerness’ to bring him home in time to fight the next election. If the Conservatives won, he would be given foreign affairs or at the very least the Colonial Office, but in any case his magnetism and personality were such that the young men of the party would want him as their next leader. Desperate to return home herself, Mary used every argument she could find to influence her husband. Her least promising approach was to tell him that he had started all the ‘mighty changes’ and that he was ‘far too brilliant and able’ just to stay in India and keep the machine pushing along. She also made more personal appeals, begging him not to stay until either he killed himself or the joie de vivre had died in them. Cecil Spring Rice had told her mother, she reported, ‘“For God’s sake get him home. Can’t Lady Curzon make him come?” Poor Lady Curzon,’ sighed Mary from Simla, ‘she couldn’t make him move an inch.’34

The Viceroy received his wife’s exhortations during an unsuccessful tiger shoot in Gwalior with his friend Scindia. He sympathized with her evident depression and blamed himself for being so absorbed by his work and its problems that he was not sufficiently loving or considerate towards her. Turning to her eagerness to put him in the Cabinet, he pointed out that there was no vacancy and that Lansdowne was not going to retire just to oblige him. Yet he must work somewhere while he he was still strong, and if there was ‘no thwart unoccupied in the home boat’, he should continue ‘to pull the stroke’ in India. His decision to stay emanated from a sense of duty guided by the self-sacrificing examples of former Viceroys. In camp at Gwalior, he told Mary, he was reading a life of Lord Canning who had been hounded in England and in India and yet had continued to do his duty without a murmur of complaint.35 Mary must have cursed her husband’s habit of self-conflation with his predecessors.

During the early months of 1903 Curzon was repeatedly urged by friends in Britain to go home and prepare himself to lead the party, to become Foreign Secretary or Prime Minister, to save the country from Joe Chamberlain. George Wyndham, whose career had not yet been destroyed by drink and Ireland, was regarded as his only possible rival for the succession to Balfour as Tory leader. Among those who wanted to see him in the forefront of domestic politics was Lord George Hamilton, who sympathized with Mary’s efforts to bring him home. Clinton Dawkins believed he would be the next Tory Prime Minister but confessed that people were worried that he had lost interest in home affairs and had developed ‘such masterful tendencies’ that he would be impossible to work with in Parliament. Curzon himself wondered whether he might have become ‘too eager and strenuous’ and now lacked the flexibility to lead at home.36

Sir Schomberg McDonnell, who for many years had been Salisbury’s Private Secretary and was still close to the Court, had no such doubts. The Cabinet, he reported in the spring of 1903, was so unimpressive – Brodrick was hated, Lansdowne stale, Gerald Balfour useless and Stanley ‘a standing joke’ – that Curzon would have no problems of readjustment on his return; indeed he was already spoken of as the next Prime Minister. In a subsequent letter written after the death of his old chief, McDonnell described Salisbury as ‘the last of his race of statesmen’ and declared that only Curzon from the present generation could be compared with him. He was glad that the Viceroy had missed the explosion over Tariff Reform and was thus not identified with either the free traders or Chamberlain’s supporters. But he believed that a prolongation of his term in India would wreck both his health and his career. Writing at the end of the year ‘with the brutality of friendship’, McDonnell told Curzon he was ‘a street ahead’ of all his contemporaries in ability and urged him not ‘to sacrifice the certainty of being prime minister to the splendid ambition of being India’s greatest viceroy’. ‘Every thoughtful man’ that he had spoken to looked forward to his return and his leadership and would lose heart if Curzon stayed in the East; his work there had been accomplished, and the time had now come for him to direct other Viceroys. Lapsing into the jargon of the turf, he claimed to have been ‘head lad’ of the Prime Minister’s string for so long that he knew Curzon was the only ‘stayer’ in the field. ‘Writing in deadly earnest’, he beseeched the Viceroy to train now for the Prime Minister’s Cup so that, after winning that race, he could run the empire from home.37

Flattering though it was to receive such appeals, Curzon was not tempted to help ‘a somewhat sick and debilitated party’ to the extent of filling an undesirable post like the War Office in the present Cabinet. In any case he was convinced that his duty lay in India, and no power on earth could have persuaded him otherwise. Balfour was therefore sent a long letter explaining why the extension should be made and including a request for a four-or five-month holiday in England or, as the Viceroy put it, ‘a brief respite from labours longer and more unbroken than any other servant of the Crown in a similar position will have undertaken for nearly half a century’.38 Six weeks passed, to Curzon’s mounting frustration, before a telegram indicating general approval arrived from Balfour. It was followed, to his fury, by a letter containing the King’s opinion, shared by the Prime Minister, that it would be dangerous for the Viceroy to spend more than six or eight weeks in Britain. Curzon was hurt and astonished that the Government should offer him so little, especially as Cromer spent three months annually in England and Milner had already been home twice from South Africa. Could the Government not realize, he asked Brodrick, that he was staying on at a positive risk both to his reputation and his health, and that only the strongest feelings of duty towards India had led him to contemplate it? Accusing Balfour of treating him as the recipient of a great favour, he suggested that six or eight weeks at home was a very ungenerous offer to someone who was staying on purely in the public interest. To Mary he disparaged the Prime Minister’s arguments as ‘utterly academic’ and characteristic of his mind, and to his father he complained that his treatment was typical of the levity and ignorance with which Indian affairs were too often dealt with at home. Dalhousie and Canning were the only men who had stayed beyond five years for half a century, and both had killed themselves in the process, coming home as broken men to die shortly afterwards. It was the old story, he told Lord Scarsdale, of the willing horse driven till he drops between the traces.39

Ian Malcolm, a backbench MP devoted to Curzon, appealed to Brodrick to press the Viceroy’s case in the Cabinet. The War Secretary reacted by banging his fists on the table, declared that nobody was indispensable and refused to stir a finger to disturb the tradition whereby Viceroys remained in India throughout their term of office.40 In June, however, Balfour accepted Curzon’s vacation requests and took advantage of the concession to lodge a justified protest against his friend’s ‘epistolary style’.

The Viceroy was still popular in India, except in military circles, and his extension was welcomed by both the Indian and the British press. It was regretted by his supporters at home, by Kitchener’s partisans in England and in India, and eventually by a great many other people, including educated Bengalis and the British Cabinet. The outstanding reforms were duly completed; one of Curzon’s late unsung achievements was the shake-up of the corrupt and inefficient police, the creation of a national force and the establishment of a directorate of Criminal Intelligence. But the personal and political cost was enormous. Balfour later told Morley he had made two mistakes as Prime Minister: the first he had forgotten and the second was to allow George Curzon to return to India.41 For the Viceroy himself it was the greatest mistake of his life. As Sir Schomberg McDonnell had foretold – yet in a more decisive way than he could possibly have feared – it wrecked Curzon’s chance of succeeding Balfour and severely blighted the rest of his career.

Why the Prime Minister let him go back remains a mystery. Hamilton reported that there had been only two willing candidates for the viceroyalty, Brodrick, who was now regarded as too tactless, and Lord Balfour of Burleigh, who, it was now believed, would succumb to liver disease or an apocalyptic fit after two years’ work under a tropical sun.42 But Selborne had long been regarded as Curzon’s successor and, as one of the few successful ministers in the Cabinet, he was certainly a plausible candidate. Originally believing that the offer of such a meagre holiday had been designed to bring him home at the normal time, Curzon subsequently ascribed his extension to the ‘interest and desire of so many to keep’ him away. ‘Awful stories of my autocracy get home’, he told Pearl Craigie, ‘and make the flesh of the cabinet creep’.43 One Indian chief, Sir Pertab Singh, believed that London politicians were envious of Curzon and eager for him not to return, a view Lawrence also encountered after his return to London in the autumn. Godley and McDonnell told him that members of the Cabinet were frightened of Curzon and found him too successful, too strenuous and too unsympathetic to their views and problems. Lawrence observed that it was not a question of fear but of jealousy.44

The second half of 1903 saw the ending, to Curzon’s regret, of three successful working relationships. Walter Lawrence, his tactful and efficient secretary, acceded to the demands of his wife and her health and left in October. Before a farewell dinner given in his honour, Lawrence begged his chief not to make any jests in his speech. ‘Jest!’ was the reply; ‘1 am far nearer to tears.’ Although ill on the night, Curzon presided over the dinner but returned to his bedroom afterwards, leaving his secretary to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ with Mary, Kitchener and the other guests. Long after midnight Lawrence went upstairs to wish him a final farewell and found him still at work, writing a long note on education.45

Another regretted departure was that of Lord Northcote, the Governor of Bombay, who had been promoted to the governor-generalship of Australia. After an early skirmish over the powers of the Governors, Curzon had co-operated well with Northcote and had come to respect his subordinate’s ability. Both Viceroy and Secretary of State recognized that, despite the belief of Bombay officials that they ran an advanced and progressive administration, it was in fact one of the most backward in India and needed an effective replacement at its head. Hamilton hoped that Sir Antony MacDonnell, who had retired from India and was now Under-Secretary in Ireland, could be enticed back, and Curzon, who had always thought the governorship should be opened to the ICS, agreed with him. The most obvious candidate still in India was Ibbetson, but he was an indispensable figure on the Viceroy’s Council who hoped eventually to return to his old province, the Punjab, as Lieutenant-Governor. When MacDonnell fell through, Curzon urged the appointment of James Bourdillon, who had revealed unexpected talents after being passed over for the lieutenant-governorship of Bengal. But Hamilton did not think a reject from Bengal would be acceptable to Bombay and decided to appoint his second choice, Lord Lamington, who had been best man at Curzon’s wedding. After the rather embarrassing governorships of Lord ‘Bingy’ Wenlock and Lord Sandhurst, Curzon did not believe that another society appointment could be foisted on India. Lamington, he told the Secretary of State, was one of those ‘delightfully irresolute people’ who never know which train to travel on. As one of his most intimate friends, he added, it had been his duty to make up his mind for him on almost everything, even to the extent of deciding which girl he should propose to. In India Lamington would presumably do nothing without consulting the Viceroy in advance, but that was of little comfort to Curzon, who had no use for yes-men. The appointment, he told Hamilton, meant ‘goodbye to administrative reform in Bombay for another five years, and that unhappy presidency, already deep in the mud, will sink lower and lower down’.46

An even more unfortunate appointment of an even closer friend followed. In September Balfour attempted to retain a balance in his Cabinet by a discreditable manoeuvre which provoked three free trade ministers to resign at the same time as Joseph Chamberlain. One of the resentful victims was Lord George Hamilton, a close parliamentary colleague of Balfour for twenty-nine years. Unlike the Prime Minister, who parted from him without regret, Curzon was genuinely sad to see Hamilton go. Despite the arguments over the coronation expenses and the salt tax, the Viceroy recognized that Hamilton had been a wise counsellor and an important ally in his programme of reforms. For his part, the Secretary of State, conscious though he was of Curzon’s foibles, regarded him as a great Viceroy and remained an admirer of his Indian policy. Neither of them were encouraged at the prospect of Hamilton’s replacement by St John Brodrick, a politician who had hitherto displayed little interest in India.

Although he had not seen his old friend for nearly five years, Curzon had heard a good deal about Brodrick’s life both from his letters, which exhorted the Viceroy to work less and be more considerate to people, and from those of friends. ‘The Brodder’ did not seem to have changed much and was still, reported Wyndham, ‘the same old ass in the matter of jests, sticking indecent labels on my tonic for the edification of the man who makes up the fire in my room’.47 Inheriting Curzon’s post at the Foreign Office, Brodrick was reported to be ‘endeavouring to develop humour which [was] rather an effort and not always quite successful’.48 His much-dreaded, self-awarded privilege – that of examining his friends’ faults and trying to correct them – had been retained. An entire Easter house party, related Alfred Lyttelton, suffered at Stanway because Brodrick ‘dealt with horrible faithfulness with the whole company one by one beginning with A.J.B. and finishing with Hilda [his wife] who retired to the breezes of the monument hill in tears and would not be comforted [or] at least would not come to luncheon till her impervious consort had left the meal’.49

After the Unionist victory in the ‘Khaki election’ of 1900, Brodrick had been promoted to the War Office, an appointment which perturbed Balfour’s secretary, who foresaw the difficulty of convincing people that the best man had been put in what was then the most onerous and important post in the administration.50 The new Secretary of State immediately launched a scheme to reorganize the army into six corps, half of them consisting of regulars providing a strike force of 120,000 men, the other three of militia and volunteers. Too hasty, too ambitious and insufficiently prepared, the plan proved to be unpopular with the army, the public and the politicians. At the end of a very costly war few people wanted to pay for a force that would be expensive in peacetime yet inadequate to make a significant contribution to a European conflict. As Winston Churchill argued, one corps of regulars was ‘quite enough to fight savages, and three not enough even to begin to fight Europeans’.51 The popularity of the project was not increased by the rancorous deportment of its initiator. Complaining of Brodrick’s ‘insufferable’ manner at the despatch box, Lord Hugh Cecil defined it as ‘hectoring pomposity stiffened with pipe clay’.52

Sympathetic though he was to his friend’s problems at the War Office, Curzon resented Brodrick’s efforts to make India contribute to their solution. In an attempt to improve recruitment in 1902, Brodrick chose to increase soldiers’ pay, a decision which applied to any part of the empire in which they were serving. India, which paid for those stationed in her territory, would therefore incur an extra annual charge of £780,000. Curzon deprecated the measure on grounds of expense but also because the low cost of living in India meant that British soldiers there were already overpaid. The increase in pay, he warned Godley, would merely ‘find its early correlative in increased syphilis and intoxication’. While equally deploring the pay rise, the Permanent Under-Secretary pointed out that the matter had to be settled in Britain and that India had no right to be consulted.53

The following year Brodrick put forward a suggestion that a special garrison of 15,000 men should be stationed in South Africa ready to be transported to India in an emergency. A firm proposal, backed by Hamilton, was made in July, with the cost to India reckoned at £400,000 a year. Neither Curzon nor Kitchener were impressed by the plan. India had recently sent troops, without advance payment, to help the empire in China, South Africa and Somaliland, yet now she was asked to contribute to the upkeep of a force she might never need. Before the Indian Government had a chance to discuss the scheme, Brodrick told Hamilton he had to mention the possibility of an Indian contribution in the House of Commons. Although Hamilton stressed that he must not commit the Indian Government, Brodrick in his ‘never-ending gaucherie’ declared his view that India ought to pay.54 He was thus very annoyed when the Government in Simla refused. ‘Those who love you best in the cabinet,’ he told Curzon with asperity, hoped that while ‘teaching us the benefit of your vigorous policy’ in Persia, Afghanistan and Tibet, ‘you would endeavour to teach India the necessity of adequately supporting it’. The Viceroy replied tersely that he had given India five years of peace and could not be reproached for rejecting a proposal to pay for troops he had not asked for and did not want.55

Brodrick rapidly became the most unpopular member of the Government. Sympathy over the unexpected death of his wife evaporated when he found a replacement a little over a year later; even his friends, Schomberg McDonnell reported, were shocked by ‘the indecent rejoicing over his second marriage’.56 As he became deafer, remarked Hamilton, Brodrick became more tactless than ever, as self-opinionated as always and now unable even to hear other people’s opinions.57 At the War Office he managed to antagonize any official, military or civilian, he had to deal with, while his continuing ‘gaucheries’, often unimportant in themselves, laid him open to constant ridicule.58 In the House of Commons he was baited by Churchill, who called his reorganization scheme ‘a humbug and a sham’, and made himself so ‘phenomenally unpopular’ that the survival of the Government was at risk. ‘Many good observers’, noted Balfour, ‘think feelings against St John so violent that we shall never get through Army Estimates without a fall! He is naturally depressed, poor old boy.’fn159

A reshuffle plainly had to be made. The Prime Minister was not renowned for standing by his friends in a crisis – Churchill once observed that, had he lived during the French Revolution, he would have been thoroughly polite about consigning an erring colleague to the guillotine60 – but Brodrick enjoyed an immunity from discardment that puzzled his associates. When Arnold-Forster went to the War Office, he was constantly subjected to pleas from A.J.B. to save ‘St John’s face at the expense of everything and everybody’, an experience he found ‘exceedingly tiresome’.61 Brodrick, who seems to have been unaware that he was not improving his reputation at the War Office, wanted to become Viceroy of India, an aspiration that was apparently taken seriously by Balfour and even by Selborne, who took modesty beyond extremes by declaring ‘the Brodder’s’ claims to be superior to his own.62 Curzon was staggered to learn that an exchange of roles was being contemplated and that he might be invited to return to England to clear up the mess left by his friend with the military. It was no comfort to hear that the War Office was so discredited that only three men – Cromer, Chamberlain and himself – were thought capable of reforming it. Nothing, he declared, would induce him to take the post. As for the succession in India, he was determined to convince Hamilton of the obvious fact that Selborne would make a much better Viceroy than Brodrick.63

Eventually it dawned upon the Cabinet that it would be ‘politically unsafe’ to put the beleaguered minister in ‘a position of such unique authority … where his discretion would be so unfettered’.64 The problem of where to put him remained unsolved for several months until Balfour decided in September that, instead of succeeding Curzon in India, Brodrick would become his superior in Whitehall. Hamilton warned the Prime Minister that the choice would provoke a ‘howl’ in India and doubted whether Brodrick would get on with Curzon or manage the India Council with success. One councillor, who thought the change ‘a great nuisance’, said the new minister was ‘not a nice man to work with’ and was ‘sure to fight’ with the Viceroy, while Kitchener, who had worked with Brodrick during the Boer War, described the possibility of his appointment as ‘too dreadful to contemplate’.65 In India the Indian and British press each raised the predicted howl. One newspaper identified Brodrick as ‘the very last person’ it wanted to see in the India Office, another believed he would be ‘almost as disastrous for India’ in his new post as he would have been as Viceroy, while a third confessed that the evolution of a successful Secretary of State for India out of an unsuccessful Secretary of State for War was a process beyond the grasp of its comprehension. The howl was repeated and amplified in Britain by the Daily Mail which attacked Balfour for lacking the courage to save ‘three hundred millions of our subjects from affording a fresh field and opportunity for the display of Mr Brodrick’s incompetence’.66

Curzon did not expect much trouble from the new minister. Brodrick’s unpopularity and his unfortunate excursions into Indian politics while at the War Office would, he thought, encourage him to make a quiet beginning, and in all probability the Unionists would be voted out of office before he had a chance to assert himself. The new relationship was initiated by a patronizing viceregal letter about the proper role of the India Office. Pointing out that the Government of India was very much more in touch with the Subcontinent’s affairs than the India Council in London, Curzon told Brodrick that the duty of the Secretary of State – as the ‘constitutional ally of the Viceroy’ – was to ensure that the Council never defeated a proposal on which the two allies were agreed.67 Sensing that he was taking advantage of the ministerial change to extend his autocracy, Godley wrote to remind the Viceroy that responsibility for his actions lay with the Secretary of State and the Cabinet, and that they enjoyed ‘a corresponding right of control, absolute and unshared’ over the Indian Government. Curzon, amused by ‘so rollicking and whole-hearted a statement of the finest old crusted doctrines of the royal prerogative’, paid no attention.68

The Viceroy’s hopes that the new Secretary of State would be content with a largely passive role at the India Office were quashed by three telegrams at the beginning of November. The first, which will be discussed in the following chapter, was a confusing, unnecessary and ultimately damaging statement of Government policy towards Tibet. The second called upon the Government of India to send 20,000 coolies to work on the railways in the Transvaal and requested a reply within four days; it also warned Curzon that disagreement might not be tolerated by the Cabinet. And the third, again requiring an answer in four days, asked for a detailed statement from the C-in-C and the Viceroy on the number of soldiers Russia might place on the Afghan frontier in case of war, together with the number India would need to counter them.69

Since the members of the Indian Government were scattered over the country far from their departments, it was impossible for them either to discuss these vital matters or to refer to their papers. Kitchener thought the military question would require months of study, while from Assam Ibbetson telegraphed his view that the Transvaal scheme was politically inadvisable and morally indefensible. Curzon, who was touring the Punjab, was annoyed by the impossible demands for rapid answers, and angered by Brodrick’s threat to order him to send coolies to South Africa. Two years earlier he had refused a Rhodesian request for Indian labour on the grounds that Indians were abominably treated in the Transvaal and Natal. Repeating this view to Brodrick, he asked why India, which had saved South Africa from the Boers, now had the duty to develop it.70 The wrangle which followed ended with India’s refusal to send the coolies and a new grievance for Brodrick. Considering the furore which later broke out over Chinese coolies in the Transvaal, it is not hard to imagine the scale of the scandal – and the damage to British rule in India – if Curzon had agreed to the request.

During his first months at the India Office Brodrick oscillated between contrasting moods. George Wyndham thought his experiences at the War Office rankled so deeply that he had neither heart nor interest in his present job.71 Certainly a good deal of time was spent trying to prevent his successor, Arnold-Forster, from dumping his army scheme. Curzon noticed this side of him and ascribed the consequent periods of tranquillity to the War Office tribulations of the ‘poor old boy’ as well as to the ‘dire results’ of his ‘early splashes’ into Indian politics.72 Brodrick sometimes liked to present himself as the humble Polonius of the friend he had always adulated. He told Mary he had practically abdicated his legal function to become ‘George’s ambassador at the Court of St James’, while to Lord Scarsdale he wrote of his ‘great joy’ at being able to work with his son even though the sphere of action was one of which George knew so much and he so little.73 Perhaps Brodrick had touches of Uriah Heep as well as Polonius and Widmerpool.

Yet there was another side to the Secretary of State. Understandably seeking to repair in his new office the reputation he had damaged in the old, he realized this could not be achieved by simply serving as a mouthpiece for Curzon. Wary of provoking another quarrel of the dimensions of the Transvaal coolies, he began to display what the Viceroy described as ‘the sort of obstinacy that revels in … petty manifestations of superior authority’. This trait was most obvious in the matter of appointments, a field in which Curzon and Hamilton had co-operated without tension. On being asked by Brodrick to recommend a judge for the High Court in Calcutta, the Viceroy put forward a barrister from Allahabad only to find that a stranger from England was chosen instead. When he was asked to suggest a new Law Member for his Council, his recommendation was once more disregarded. As an obsessive believer in promotion by merit, Curzon cannot have been consoled by Brodrick’s assurance that the new member, H. Erle Richards, ‘should be thoroughly agreeable socially’ because he had been Alfred Lyttelton’s fag at Eton and was married to the Master of Trinity’s niece.fn274

Nevertheless, in the light of his later behaviour, it is impossible to attribute Brodrick’s obstructiveness simply to his desire to distinguish himself after the humiliations of the War Office. Harry Cust, a fellow member of the Souls, suggested that his actions at the India Office constituted a revenge for Curzon’s constant teasing during their three decades of friendship. While this explanation also seems a little facile, it surely contains an essential truth. Brodrick had once said that ‘one of the brightest elements’ of his life had been watching Curzon ‘gaily flying the fences’ which he had ‘laboriously climbed’.76 Yet, as mutual friends were aware, he was also jealous of Curzon’s superior talents, and later, when he too had reached the top, he resented the Viceroy’s failure to take his views more seriously. Placed suddenly and unexpectedly as his former hero’s superior, he took advantage of the position to enforce the missing deference.