On December 29, 1895, the long-standing conflict between the Boer Republic of the Transvaal and the British of the Cape Colony was broken open by the Jameson Raid. Nominally under British suzerainty but virtually independent, the Boer Republic was a block in the march of British red down the length of Africa and an oppressor of the Uitlanders within its borders. These were British and other foreigners who, drawn by gold, had flocked to, and settled in, the Transvaal until they now outnumbered the Boers, but were kept by them without suffrage and other civil rights, and were seething with grievances. Inspired by imperialism’s impatient genius, Cecil Rhodes, Dr. Jameson led six hundred horsemen over the border with intent to bring about an uprising of the Uitlanders, overthrow the Boer government and bring the South African Republic under British control. His troop was surrounded and captured within three days, but his mission released a train of events that was to take full effect four years later.
For the moment it provided the ever alert Kaiser with an opening. He telegraphed congratulations to President Kruger of the Boer Republic on his success in repelling the invaders “without appealing to the help of friendly powers.” The implication that such help would be available on future request was clear. Instantly, every British gaze, like spectators’ heads at a tennis match, turned from America to Germany, and British wrath was diverted from President Cleveland, always unlikely in the role of menace, to the Kaiser, who played it so much more suitably. In helping to bring on the ultimate encirclement that he most dreaded, the Kruger telegram was one of the Kaiser’s most effective efforts. It revealed a hostility that startled the British. From that moment the possibility that isolation might prove more hazardous than splendid began to trouble the minds of their policy-makers.
The year 1895 was prolific of shocks, and one that shook society unpleasantly occurred two months before the Conservatives took office. The trial and conviction of Oscar Wilde under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, for acts of gross indecency between males, destroyed both a brilliant man of letters and the mood of decadence he symbolized.
The presumption of decay had been heavily reinforced two years earlier by Max Nordau in a widely discussed book called Degeneration. Through six hundred pages of mounting hysteria he traced the decay lurking impartially in the realism of Zola, the symbolism of Mallarmé, the mysticism of Maeterlinck, in Wagner’s music, Ibsen’s dramas, Manet’s pictures, Tolstoy’s novels, Nietzsche’s philosophy, Dr. Jaeger’s woollen clothing, in Anarchism, Socialism, women’s dress, madness, suicide, nervous diseases, drug addiction, dancing, sexual license, all of which were combining to produce a society without self-control, discipline or shame which was “marching to its certain ruin because it is too worn out and flaccid to perform great tasks.”
Wilde, conforming to the duty of a decadent, was already engaged in destroying himself. In his role of aesthete, voluptuary and wit, he had hitherto been protected by the enamel of success. His incomparable talk enraptured friends as his plays did the public. But his arrogance as artist became overweening and his appetites uncontrolled, so that he grew fat and loose and heavy-jowled and, as a friend remarked, “all his bad qualities began to show in his face.” Nor did success satisfy him, for satiety required that he must taste the ultimate sensation of ruin. “I was a problem,” he said in sad self-knowledge, “for which there was no solution.” He precipitated his own arrest by taking action for libel against the Marquess of Queensberry. The ensuing trials tore away Society’s screen of discretion and gave everyone a shuddering look at the livid gleam of vice: panders, male prostitutes, hotel-room assignations with a valet, a groom, a boat-attendant picked up on a beach, and blackmail. No charges were brought against Lord Alfred Douglas, son of the Marquess of Queens-berry, the flowery and seductive young man who shared these practices as well as Wilde’s company and affections. Nor had there been any charges when Lord Arthur Somerset, a son of the Duke of Beaufort and a friend of the Prince of Wales, had been found in a homosexual brothel raided by the police in 1889. He had been allowed to take himself off and live comfortably after his fashion on the Continent while the Prince had asked Lord Salisbury that he might occasionally be permitted to visit his parents quietly in the country “without fear of being apprehended on this awful charge.”
Frank Harris, then editor of the Fortnightly Review, thought that the solidarity of the governing class would close protectively around his friend Oscar in the same way. He supposed that aristocratic prejudice was a matter of favoring the exceptional over the common and would operate equally for the lord, the millionaire and the “man of genius.” He was mistaken. Wilde had done the unforgivable in forcing public notice of his sin. And as artist-intellectual caught in scarlet depravity he evoked the howl of the philistines and plunged the British public into one of the most virulent of its periodic fits of morality. The judge was malevolent, the public vituperative, the society which he had amused turned its back, cabbies and newsboys exchanged vulgar jokes about “Oscar,” the press reviled him, his books were withdrawn from sale and his name pasted out on the playbills advertising The Importance of Being Earnest, his brightest diamond, then playing to enchanted audiences. His downfall, said the gentleman-Socialist H. M. Hyndman, “was the most grievous thing I have ever known in the literary world.” With it was dissipated, in England, if not on the Continent, the yellow haze of fin de siècle decadence.
Lord Salisbury’s appointment of a Poet Laureate at the end of the year could not have provided a greater contrast in men of letters or done more to re-enthrone Respectability. Since the death of Tennyson in 1892, the post had remained vacant because neither Mr. Gladstone nor Lord Rosebery, who took their responsibility to literature seriously, could find a worthy successor. Swinburne, owing to his distressing habits and opinions, was, regrettably, “absolutely impossible” (although Mr. Gladstone “admired his genius”), William Morris was a Socialist, Hardy was known so far only by his novels and the younger poetic talents tended to wear the colors of the Yellow Book and the Mauve Decade. The young Anglo-Indian, Rudyard Kipling, in his Barrack Room Ballads of 1892, had certainly sounded a virile and imperial note but in a rather rough idiom, and neither he nor W. E. Henley nor Robert Bridges was considered. All other candidates were mediocrities, one of whom, Sir Lewis Morris, offered an opening to what a contemporary called “the most spontaneously witty thing ever uttered in England.” Morris, author of an effusion entitled The Epic of Hades, who wanted the Laureateship badly, complained to Oscar Wilde in the days before his ruin, “There is a conspiracy of silence against me, a conspiracy of silence. What ought I to do, Oscar?” “Join it,” replied Wilde.
On the principle that, like bishops, one Laureate would do as well as another, Lord Salisbury, when he became Prime Minister, appointed Alfred Austin. A journalist of deep Conservative dye, founder and editor of the National Review, Austin was also the producer of fervent topical verse on such occasions as the death of Disraeli. When a friend pointed out grammatical errors in his poems, Austin said, “I dare not alter these things. They come to me from above.” He was a tiny man—five feet high—with a round face and neat white moustache who, as a contributor of articles expounding Conservative foreign policy which he signed “Diplomaticus,” was personally acquainted with the Prime Minister and a frequent visitor to Hatfield. He had begun his career as a correspondent in the war of 1870 by gaining an interview with Bismarck at Versailles, and thirty years later was forced to the painful conclusion that Germany, in her wars of 1859–70, had “unquestionably resorted to means which one could not conceive Alfred the Great or any modern British minister employing.” His most popular work so far had been a prose book on English gardens, but within two weeks of his appointment as Laureate, he exceeded expectations with a poem in The Times celebrating Dr. Jameson’s exploit:
There are girls in the gold-reef city,
There are mothers and children too!
And they cry, Hurry up! for pity!
So what could a brav
e man do?…
So we forded and galloped forward,
As hard as our beasts could pelt,
First eastward, then trending northward,
Right over the rolling veldt.…
Some echo of the hilarity this provoked reaching the Queen, she queried Salisbury, who had to admit that her new Laureate’s first effusion was “unluckily to the taste of the galleries in the lower class of theatres who sing it with vehemence.” Salisbury never bothered to explain his choice of Austin beyond an off-hand remark once that “he wanted it”; but if the choice did not honor British poetry, it was a shrewd match of the British mood.
The Englishman, as an American observer noticed, felt himself the best-governed citizen in the world even when in Opposition he believed the incumbents were ruining the country. The English form of government “is the thing above all others that he is proud of … and he has an unshakeable confidence in the personal integrity of statesmen.” Austin reflected that comfortable pride. In the radiant summer of Jubilee Year, 1897, a visitor found him in linen suit and panama hat, sitting in a high-backed wicker chair, on the lawn of his country home enjoying conversation with Lady Paget and Lady Windsor. They agreed that each person should tell what was his idea of heaven. Austin’s wish was noble. He desired to sit in a garden and receive a flow of telegrams announcing alternately a British victory by sea and a British victory by land.
It was easy to make fun of Alfred Austin, with his small size, large pomposity and banal verse, and many did. Yet in his Jubilee wish there was something simple and devoted, an assurance, a complete and happy love and admiration for his country, a noncognizance of wrong, which expressed a mood and a condition which, like Lord Ribblesdale’s appearance, were to become beyond recapture.
The House of Lords, now that the Conservatives had replaced the Liberals, could lean back comfortably and follow its natural bent, which was to do as little work as possible. In the last years of the Liberals it had roused itself to “stop the rot” induced by Radical legislation and had thrown out an Employers’ Liability Bill, a Parish Councils Bill designed to make local government councils more democratic, and finally the Home Rule Bill. In the last speech of his career on March 1, 1894, Gladstone had solemnly warned that differences of “fundamental tendency” between the two Houses had reached a point in the past year which required that some solution would have to be found for “this tremendous contrariety and incessant conflict upon matters of high principle and profound importance.” Proposals for reform of the Upper House to redress the imbalance when a Liberal Government was in power and thus remove the grounds of criticism had been many. But now that a state of happy harmony had succeeded conflict, the urgency relaxed, Gladstone’s warning was forgotten and the Lords could resume their customary quiescence.
Out of 560 members, many “backwoods” peers, as they were called, never took their seats at all. Others appeared only at times of crisis and hardly more than fifty regularly attended the sessions. It was, said Lord Newton, “the most good-natured assembly that exists,” hearing out speakers who would not be listened to for five minutes in the Commons. Its debates were “always polite” and conducted with a restraint which seemed to show “detachment almost amounting to indifference.” Party animosity was concealed “under a veil of studied courtesy.” It was not a stimulating audience, especially to Liberals, whose leader, Lord Rosebery, complained that “every auditor gives the impression of profound weariness and boredom.”
While Lord Salisbury was Prime Minister the House of Lords was entirely under his dominance, although its official ruler was the Lord Chancellor, who acted as Speaker. This office was now held by Lord Halsbury, born a commoner, by name Hardinge Giffard, a member of one of the oldest families in England. Its founder had fought at Hastings and was later created Earl of Buckingham by William Rufus. Although the title died out in the next generation, the family persisted with vigor if not riches and the sprightly Lord Chancellor, seventy-two at this time, lived to be ninety-eight. A stubby Pickwickian figure with short legs, red cheeks, white tufts of hair over his ears and a humorous expression, Lord Halsbury, despite his genial manner, was a hard opponent, implacable at the bar, with a relentless memory. He wore a frock coat, a square-topped derby hat, a “true blue” Tory tie and, according to a younger member of the Upper House, “invariably objected on principle to all change.” Owing to meagre family finances, he had been educated at home by his father, a barrister and editor of a high Tory daily paper, the Standard, who gave him lessons in Greek, Latin and Hebrew until 4 A.M. and was so upright that he refused an offer from the Duke of Newcastle, an admirer of his paper, to put his three sons through Oxford. The youngest son went through Merton College nevertheless, rose rapidly to the top of the legal profession, acquiring wealth and friends on the way as well as the accusation from some quarters that he “filled his great office with jolly cynicism” and made unscrupulous use of the Bench for political patronage. However, when from among many rival claimants he was named Lord Chancellor, making him the highest-ranking personage after the royal family and the Archbishop of Canterbury, the “Carlton Club supported him to a man,” and Lord Coleridge, the Lord Chief Justice and a Liberal, wrote, “Your politics are of course unintelligible to me but in everything else, as a scholar, a gentleman and a lawyer, there is no one fitter to be our head.”
Two high-ranking peers in Lord Salisbury’s Cabinet, the fifth Marquess of Lansdowne and the eighth Duke of Devonshire, were both Whigs of pedigree and converts to the Conservatives. Lord Lansdowne, the Secretary for War, was an aristocrat who looked it every inch. Smooth and cold as polished stone, elegant, correct and courteous, he was an obvious choice for the great ceremonial posts and had been Governor-General of Canada at thirty-eight and Viceroy of India at forty-three. His family name was Fitzmaurice. In the Twelfth Century the first of his line had settled in Ireland in county Kerry and the current Marquess was twenty-eighth Lord of Kerry in the direct male line. He was one of those Anglo-Irishmen, said the Spectator in commenting on the quality of Lord Salisbury’s Government, “who can rule by a sort of instinct.” The instinct had flourished in his great-grandfather, the first Marquess, who as Earl of Shelburne had been a secretary of state under George III, and had served briefly as Prime Minister in the last year of the war with the American Colonies. The same instinct carried his grandfather, the third Marquess, to the Home Office and other posts in six governments between 1827 and 1857, after which he had declined to be Prime Minister and had refused a dukedom. The present Marquess seemed to his brother-in-law, Lord Ernest Hamilton, to be “the greatest gentleman of his day,” who in any international competition for gentlemen must surely be nominated the British representative.
Senior to, and even grander than, Lansdowne—but wearing the patrician air without self-consciousness—was Spencer Compton Cavendish, eighth Duke of Devonshire, probably the only man in England both secure enough and careless enough to forget an engagement with his sovereign. Edward VII, having informed the Duke that he proposed to dine quietly with him at Devonshire House on a certain day, duly arrived, to the consternation of the household, for the Duke was not at home and had to be hurriedly retrieved from the Turf Club.
He was sixty-two in 1895, tall and bearded, with heavy-lidded eyes in a long Hapsburg face and a straight, lordly, high-ridged nose. Formerly Lord Hartington during his thirty-four years in the House of Commons, he was now Lord President of the Council in Salisbury’s Cabinet. He owned 186,000 acres and had an income of £180,000 from land alone, not counting investments. Though famous for his lassitude, he had managed to serve in more Cabinet offices under more governments than any man living: as First Lord of the Admiralty under Lord Palmerston, Secretary for War under Lord John Russell, Postmaster-General, Secretary for Ireland, for India and again for War in successive Gladstone governments. A familiar sight coming down Whitehall was Lord Hartington driving himself to the House in a light phaeton with a careless hold on the reins, a large cig
ar in his mouth and a collie sitting next to him.
He had played a leading role in growing opposition to Mr. Gladstone in the two crises of the eighties that broke apart the Liberal party: the imperialist issue over General Gordon’s expedition to the Sudan and the Irish issue over Home Rule. Though he was not one of the polished and impassioned orators, his speech in 1886 announcing his break with Gladstone made a profound impression. By stating plainly that men could not remain in the false position of continuing to support a government, even of their own party, whose principles they disapproved, he gave, said a member, “a new sense of duty and a new power of action to hundreds of men throughout the country.” Henry Chaplin thought the speech ought “to make you Prime Minister for certain.” Some years earlier the Queen, in her stubborn effort to avoid the inevitability of Mr. Gladstone, had already asked Lord Hartington to form a government; but he had refused, bowing to Gladstone, who, he knew, would not serve except in first place.
In the opinion of Mr. Balfour, an expert, Lord Hartington was “of all the statesmen I have known … the most persuasive speaker,” less for his words than for the character behind them. He made every listener feel that here was a man “who has done his best to master every aspect of this question, who has been driven by logic to arrive at certain conclusions, and who is disguising from us no argument on either side.… How can we hope to have a more honest guide?” It was this quality, said Balfour, which Hartington possessed “in far greater measure than any man I have ever known,” which gave him his great influence with the public, made him indispensable to governments and, whether in the Cabinet, in Parliament, or on the public platform, “gave him a dominant position in any assembly.”
The Duke would have preferred to be anywhere else, for he undertook the hard work and confining hours of government office more from duty than desire. But he was requited by the feeling of sovereign and country that he was one of the pillars on which the state reposed. “The Queen cannot conclude this letter,” Victoria wrote to him in 1892, “without expressing to the Duke … how much she relies on him to assist in maintaining the safety and honor of her vast Empire. All must join”—she finished in simple summary of her faith—“in this great and necessary work.”