1. Ancestral Silence

1 Re-named but undisguised as Eliza Pergamon, she is the villainess in Mary E. Mann’s novel, The Memories of Ronald Love, published in 1907.

2. ‘Passionate Resolves’: Eton, 1872–1878

1 He changed his name to Cory and is chiefly remembered as the author of ‘Heraclitus’ and the ‘Eton Boating Song’.

2 Browning’s library would thus have contained the authors of two famous patriotic anthems. Spring Rice wrote ‘I vow to thee my country’ shortly before he died in 1918, while Benson penned the much less memorable words of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Stephen, who died in his early thirties, was the author of some delightful light verse.

3 Verses three and four.

4 Two years earlier Sir Wilfrid Lawson had been one of only two MPs to vote for a republican motion of Sir Charles Dilke aiming to set up a select committee to enquire into the Civil List. An eccentric figure, he was a leading spokesman of the temperance movement and a teetotaller so fanatical that he had smashed the contents of a magnificent cellar he had inherited in Cumberland; the silver teapots he invariably gave as wedding presents had an obvious symbolic purpose.34

5 Since his death Curzon has featured both as author and subject at Speeches: in 1950 James Bruxner delivered the speech Curzon made to the Byculla Club at Bombay, and four years later another boy recited his conversation as described by Harold Nicolson in his book Some People.

3. ‘Laying the Foundations’: Oxford, 1878–1883

1 The extent of Jowett’s personal influence is often difficult to judge, particularly with regard to Grey. The future Foreign Secretary did no work at Balliol and was sent down from the university. Exhorted by Jowett to be less indolent, he was allowed back to take his examination in the summer of 1884 but achieved only a Third in jurisprudence. Yet a latent political ambition must have been stirred during this period because the following year Grey became the youngest member of the House of Commons.11

6. ‘Travel with a Purpose’, 1887–1890

1 After her marriage to George Wyndham she preferred to keep her first husband’s name.

7. ‘The Coming Man’, 1890–1895

1 See next chapter.

8. Hearts and Souls

1 Curzon lightly mocked Stead in his prize-winning poem at the Crabbet Club.

In an epoch so degenerate

That no one dares to venerate

The ruffian and the libertine, the criminal and rogue,

When all our old criteria

Have been shattered by hysteria,

And the moral standard set by Stead is the new and patent vogue …

10. Sailing to Bombay

1 The Act of Union with Ireland, like that with Scotland, gave the country’s peers the right to elect a certain number of their representatives to the House of Lords. The remainder, like Lord Palmerston, could become members of the House of Commons.

11. The Governance of India

1 Collen was either unaware of the Viceroy’s view or else he did not resent it. Ten years later he wrote privately of his ‘intense admiration’ for Curzon and described himself as one of his ‘staunchest friends’;24 he also supported him during and after the controversy with Kitchener.

2 The administration of the princely states will be discussed in Chapter 13.

12. ‘Let India Be My Judge’

1 A term, often used disparagingly, to denote a semi-anglicized Hindu.

14. Guarding the Frontiers

1 Curzon’s creation survives today, with the same name, as a province of Pakistan. Its birth required a change of title for MacDonnell’s province which encompassed Agra, Lucknow and Benares. Originally called the North-Western Provinces because they were north-west of Bengal, their name had long been irrational (they lie to the south-east of the Punjab) and was now changed to the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh.

2 See below, pp. 286–7.

15. The Viceroy’s Routine

1 The Conservative and Liberal Unionist coalition was usually referred to as the Unionist Party for the first two decades of the twentieth century.

16. 1902: Proconsular Zenith

1 In the autumn the commanding office of the regiment admitted he knew the identity of one of the culprits but said his guilt could not be proved in court.19

2 The appointment of Victor Cavendish as Financial Secretary to the Treasury was the best example of the hereditary principle in action. He was the nephew and heir of Devonshire and the son-in-law of Lansdowne.

3 Although the Lancers were unaware of the fact, they owed their presence in Delhi entirely to an intervention on their behalf by the Viceroy.

17. Fatal Appointments, 1902–1903

1 A ‘whipping’ scandal in the Grenadier Guards, after which the commanding officer was suspended on half pay, was an additional – and unfair – reason for Brodrick’s unpopularity.

2 After working with him for a year and a half, Curzon declared that Richards was ‘a charming fellow’ but ‘so utterly useless in administration’ that he doubted whether he ought to receive an honour customarily bestowed on members of the Viceroy’s Council.75

19. ‘An Infinitude of Trouble’: England, 1904

1 Walmer Castle and Its Lords Warden was published two years after his death. Most of the early sections are as he wrote them, but the last part was compiled from his notes by the editor, Stephen Gwynn.

20. Kitchener’s Conspiracy

1 Kitchener’s title as Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian army.

2 Brodrick wrote this when Curzon was on his way back to England.

3 Lady Elles was one of the most remarkable Englishwomen in India, gentle, charitable and compassionate. Her death achieved the almost impossible feat of subduing Simla. ‘“She was a saint,” said men who had never spoken to [Mrs Wilson] about “saints” before, but who were as white and drawn as if she had been “their own mother” too … Women who never showed anything but smiles to the world were silently weeping now; and when talkative Simla returned to the Mall, not a voice broke the silence of the long drive to our homes.’33

4 He did not ask General Sir Edmund Barrow, the commander of the Peshawar Division, or of course Elles, both of whom would have disagreed with him.

5 The disingenuousness of the disclaimer is breathtaking. Repington had received the information from Marker, who was working harder for Kitchener than anyone but was no longer formally under his command.

6 In the event Lord Salisbury was too ill to attend the committee and did not sign its report.

7 Brodrick frequently repeated this anecdote, which no one else seems to have heard, and later expanded the figure to 5 00,000.70

21. The Breaking of the Viceroy

1 Detailed drawings were made, and Curzon intended to go ahead with the plan even after Mary’s death. He later abandoned it because, in his own words, ‘the violent outbreak of sedition in Bengal in 1908–9, accompanied by a good deal of rancorous abuse against myself, led me to fear that any monument erected by me in Calcutta would be liable to desecration at the hands of Bengali agitators. Such a fate for the memorial of my darling I could not contemplate.’5

2 Winston Churchill believed Curzon had seen this telegram and thought he should have ‘called on K to explain himself, accused him of being the liar and intriguer he was, and reported the whole thing to the War Office, when it would have been Kitchener who would have had to resign’.58 But Curzon had declined to look at the C-in-C’s telegrams (see above, p. 297) and did not learn of this episode until it was too late.59

3 The last charge was unfair. Balfour had seen several Asian coastlines during his voyage round the world in 1875.

4 The most farcical episode of the Curzon-Kitchener saga took place four years later on the eve of the C-in-C’s departure from India. Too lazy to compose his farewell speech at Simla, Kitchener entrusted the task to his Chief of Staff, Sir Beauchamp Duff, who, also finding it rather an effort, imagined he could plagiarize Curzon’s Byculla Club speech without anyone noticing. A correspondent in The Times took much pleasure in printing extracts from the two speeches and showing readers how Kitchener had borrowed whole passages from his rival unaltered but for the occasional use of a synonym. Lord Minto, an admirer of the C-in-C, thought the episode particularly absurd because Kitchener had little else to do, hardly ever wrote his own notes and, according to various people, never did any work after midday.96 Appointed C-in-C in 1913, General Duff was the first person to have to plan a major campaign under Kitchener’s system. The new organization functioned much as Curzon had predicted and was largely responsible for the tragedy in Mesopotamia in 1916 (see below, pp. 477–80).

22. ‘Every Man’s Hand’

1 These included Donald Smeaton, whom he refused to make Lieutenant-Governor of Burma, Sir Henry Cotton, whom he did not appoint to the lieutenant-governorship of Bengal, and John Rees, whom, in spite of reiterated applications, he did not recommend for a knighthood.

23. Picking Up the Pieces

1 In December of the following year, after a strong summing-up in his favour, the jury awarded Curzon £155 for or the repair of his car and £100 for general damages.

2 Many years later Morley came to the conclusion that he and Grey had been wrong about the Anglo-Russian Convention and that Curzon had been right.’53

3 See above, p. 324.

25. Suffragists and Other Targets, 1911–1914

1 See below, pp. 417–18.

2 He didn’t. She jilted him after buying her trousseau and married the brother of the Maharaja of Cooch Behar.

3 In 1911 Delhi was the seventh largest city in India with 232,837 inhabitants. Calcutta and its adjoining municipalities had a population of 1,222,313, Bombay 979,445 and Madras 518,660. The non-military British population of Calcutta was 12,080, of Bombay 10,131 and of Delhi 84.

26. Lord Curzon at Home

1 Although such comparisons are always misleading, this sum would have been the equivalent of about £1.5 million after tax in 1994.

2 The Mary Curzon Hostel for ‘poor but respectable women’ was founded by Curzon and the Duchess of Marlborough. The building near King’s Cross Station was opened by Queen Alexandra in 1913.

28. Air Board and War Cabinet, 1916

1 Apart from Bonar Law the meeting consisted of Curzon, Chamberlain, Long, Smith, Crawford and Lord Robert Cecil. Balfour was ill and Lansdowne had remained in the country.

2 Unfamiliar with Curzon’s handwriting, Lansdowne’s biographer, Lord Newton, transcribed these words as ‘a Protean compromise’, a phrase copied by all subsequent historians. Suitably Curzonian though it sounds, the term is meaningless in this context.

3 We, in some unknown Power’s employ,

Move on a rigorous line:

Can neither, when we will, enjoy;

Nor, when we will, resign.

29. The Second Lady Curzon

1 The author has been unable to discover why Grace was called ‘the Egyptian’ or what is meant by ‘webby hair’.

2 An ineffective precaution, as it turned out, because Grace’s letters have for some reason survived.

3 Curzon’s services to that country were not restricted to entertaining her royal family and some of her wounded soldiers. In both the Cabinet and the Imperial War Cabinet he argued against the bombing of those German targets in occupied Belgium that was likely to cause casualties among civilians. He also submitted to his colleagues, though without endorsement, King Albert’s claims to the strip of Dutch Flanders on the left bank of the Scheldt.

30. Eastern Questions, 1917

1 In 1916 the Governments of Britain, France and Russia had come to a secret understanding on sharing the Middle East between them after the war. Known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement (see below, p. 519), it was not discussed by the Imperial War Cabinet and remained a secret until November 1917 when the Bolsheviks published it soon after taking power.

2 These contradictions are at their most blatant with Balfour, who had restricted Jewish immigration to Britain with the Aliens Act when Prime Minister, had told Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader, that he shared Cosima Wagner’s ‘anti-semitic postulates’,29 and yet believed the Jews were the ‘most gifted race’ in the world and that Arab interests should be ignored so that they could live in Palestine.

31. Lord President

1 Although he was not officially a member, Bonar Law often attended the committee’s meetings.

2 These were contained in the ambiguous correspondence between Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, and Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, in 1915 and 1916. Curzon was referring to McMahon’s pledge of British support for Arab independence in territories conquered from the Turks except in those ‘portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo’. Although Britain later claimed that these were intended to include Palestine, the Arabs have disputed the point because the Holy Land in fact lies to the south-south-west of Damascus, the southernmost town. Curzon agreed with the Arabs. He had never been able to satisfy himself, he said long afterwards, that McMahon ‘really had excluded Palestine when talking about the areas to the west of the towns’.27

3 The debate turned out to be academic. Kaiser Wilhelm fled to Holland, which had remained neutral in the war and which refused to hand him over to the Allies afterwards.

33. Middle Eastern Scrambles, 1919–1922

1 Nowadays he is referred to as Woṯūq-al-Dawla. But as transliterative fashions in Persian and Arabic change fairly often, the English spellings of the time have generally been used here.

2 £I was worth just over 2.5 tomans.

3 In February 1920 Prince Akbar Mirza tried to persuade the chief manager to make false entries in the Bank’s books to disguise the bribes.12

34. Lloyd George and the Turks, 1919–1922

1 In fact the Ottoman Sultans had only claimed the title of Caliph – Successor to the Messenger of God (i.e. to Muhammad) – from the end of the eighteenth century. Their supposed succession to the Abbasid Caliphate was a myth invented for political reasons at the same time.

35. Resurgence: Lausanne, 1922–1923

1 After the Irish treaty of 1921 Unionists tended once more to call themselves Conservatives.

2 Even though Churchill himself admitted that the dinner took place ‘some weeks’ earlier – that is, before the Chanak crisis – it is widely supposed to have been held at Churchill’s house on 11 October, a week before the Coalition fell. As Curzon attacked the plan to hold an early election at meetings with his colleagues on both the 10th and the 12th, he is unlikely to have agreed to it on the 11th. No mention of the dinner, moreover, is made in the biographies of the other senior ministers who are alleged to have been present, while Churchill’s official biographer records his subject spending the normal dining hours of the 11th sending telegrams to the Dominions.2

3 See above, p. xii.

4 Three of them had fellowships of All Souls, six had first-class (or double first) degrees, and Amery had both. Among the leading Coalitionists only Birkenhead had a comparable record.

5 Britain’s second plenipotentiary was Sir Horace Rumbold, the High Commissioner in Constantinople. Recommending him for the post in 5920, Curzon had remarked for the King’s benefit that ‘behind a somewhat bovine and unimpressive exterior’ there lay ‘ability, sound sense, courage and discretion’20

6 The Turks continued to dispute the issue for another three years before accepting the verdict of the League of Nations in 1926. The League’s case was based, as they had feared, on Curzon’s arguments, and Mosul remained part of Iraq.

36. Family Sagas

1 A letter from Duff Cooper to his wife in January 1919 mentions ‘Scatters’ Marchesa’, a reference which has been interpreted to mean Grace. But as she did not become a Marchioness until 5921, he must have been writing about someone else, presumably an Italian.

37. Ultimate Disappointments, 1923–1925

1 King George took little trouble to disguise his antipathy for Curzon. After Herman Norman’s return from Tehran in 1921, the diplomat found his sovereign ‘a little indiscreet in his comments on Curzon’s policy in Persia and character generally; he evidently dislikes him extremely’.15

2 Later a memorial tablet was placed in the Abbey in a small passage near the Chapel of Henry VII. A few feet away is the plaque which Curzon himself unveiled for Cromer, and close by another tablet commemorates Milner. No other nation would hide its proconsuls in such a place.