ANGER AND MORTIFICATION

“Perched as I am on a dreary, sad pinnacle of solitary grandeur.”--_Queen Victoria, in a letter to Sir Theodore Martin._

“The cause of the rising in the Sudan is the cause of all risings against Turkish rule, wherever they have occurred. No one who has been in a Turkish province and has witnessed the results of the Bashi-Bazouk system, which excited so much indignation some time ago in Bulgaria, will need to be told why the people of the Sudan have risen in revolt against the Khedive. The Turks, the Circassians, and the Bashi-Bazouks have plundered and oppressed the people in the Sudan as they plundered and oppressed them in the Balkan peninsula.... That the people were justified in rebelling, nobody who knows the treatment to which they were subjected will attempt to deny.... It is a mistake to regard the Mahdi as in any sense a religious leader; he personified popular discontent.... The movement is not religious, but an outbreak of despair.”--_Letter by General Gordon, included in ‘Events in the Life of Charles G. Gordon,’ by H. W. Gordon._

With the fall and death of Disraeli the Queen lost far more than a friend; she lost her dreams, her ambition, her feeling of security and her happiness. When Gladstone was in power his aim was to consolidate Britain from within; when Beaconsfield was in power his desire was to extend the empire outwards. The former went straight at his mark of renovating outworn laws and customs, raising the standard of the people and reforming abuses; the latter spoke softly to his Queen, pointed to her colonies and whispered that they spread over the earth, that the tie which must bind them to England would be neither Parliament nor blood, but the Empress-Queen. Beaconsfield raised dreams of world-wide dominance which would have done justice to a Hohenzollern; he bred in her mind an appreciation of war, and tutored her in believing that aggrandisement justified war; he kept the people in a constant state of surprise, cast over them the glamour of a spirited foreign policy, and presented them with finely coloured dramatic pictures, such as Peace with Honour, and Imperialism, and, by diverting their minds, laid to rest for the moment republican sentiments. Under his adroit management Victoria came more among her people--in face of Gladstone’s straightforward arguments she drew back into her seclusion. She refused to open Gladstone’s Parliaments, but for Beaconsfield she was present at least every other year. When Prince Leopold came of age, Dizzy asked for him £15,000 a year with a flourish of trumpets. Leopold was a sage, an intellectual of the rarest merit; he was like his great father who had “given a new impulse to the course of civilization”; and the pension was granted with few dissentients. When the Duke of Connaught married and wanted his income increased the request was quietly acceded to, for there was a rumour that he was to be made Viceroy of Ireland, so that there was no Irish opposition. But when Leopold, who was created by the Queen, in May 1881, Duke of Albany--a sinister title, for all the royal dukes of that name had died young or been murdered!--asked the usual increase in March 1882, on his marriage with Helene of Waldeck-Pyrmont, there was strong opposition. Irish hopes had not been fulfilled by the Connaughts, and Irish affairs were in a desperate condition, so forty-two, mostly Irish patriots, voted against the royal wishes, and Labouchere again raised the question of what became of the Civil List money not spent by the Crown. Gladstone, as usual, defended the Queen, but admitted that she took private possession of the money saved by her economies on the Civil List. However, in a House of 387 the majority was 345. The fact remained that under Gladstone these discussions arose.

When Beaconsfield had decided to go to the country in 1880 he cast about for a cry which might be popular, and pitched upon Anti-Home Rule. These words had come into use long before, Gladstone saying in 1871, “I am not quite certain what is meant by Home Rule.” At the moment of the dissolution, however, there was no demand for it, as Ireland had suffered from bad potato harvests and was on the verge of starvation; Parnell, already a personage, had his hands full in devising means of safeguarding the Irish, and gave the somewhat natural advice that they should save money as much as possible, and pay as little rent as possible, so that when the deadliest pinch came food could still be bought. This alienated both Liberal and Tory, for the sacredness of property over life was even more pronounced then than now. Thus the anti-Home Rule cry interested no one and had no influence on the election; the people were too occupied with their sudden fear of the two recent costly wars of aggrandisement, with the suspicion that a “spirited foreign policy” was not worth paying for, and their sudden reaction in favour of Gladstone, to whom they turned with expectation.

Six years earlier he had resigned the leadership of the Opposition to Lord Granville, a member of the Upper House, and the Liberals had chosen Lord Hartington to lead them in the Commons. Thus Granville was the responsible person. Beaconsfield, however, thought that Hartington would interfere least with his line of policy, and advised Victoria to send for him, which she did. Gladstone had naturally said that he would not take office under any one, and neither Granville nor Hartington had any fancy to have Gladstone thundering over their heads from a back bench, and putting them right. So when Hartington had his interview with the Queen, whose face he could only see imperfectly, as she stood with her back to the window, he told her that Gladstone was the only man who could form a Government and that his Government would be more moderate than any he himself could get together. The Queen implored him to do her wishes, appealing to him as responsible leader of the Party, and continued to do so in answer to all he said. She then asked if he was sure Mr. Gladstone would not serve under him.

“I can’t say I am sure he wouldn’t, ma’am, for I’ve never ventured to ask him.”

“Now I beg you will ask him and come back and let me know what he says.”

The next day Hartington and Granville went to Windsor, and both said it was impossible for either to become leader while Gladstone was at hand, and so they were sent back to summon Gladstone. The Queen was quite courteous to him, but seemed “natural under effort, and the interview ended pleasantly,” at least on the surface.

Beaconsfield blamed Hartington bitterly for not taking the first office, saying that he showed a want of courage, and “abandoned a woman in her hour of need,” and he moaned, “All becomes chaos, all becomes chaos when I am away.”

Victoria took leave of him that April of 1880 as though all peace had left her, and offered to confer on him a dukedom, which he declined. She felt that her prospects of world-domination were gone, that there would be no more wars of expansion, that once again the wearisome and, from her point of view, dangerous policy of internal reform would replace those glorious dreams. So she looked about for a means of counteracting what she regarded as the coming retrograde policy, and she turned to the Army, determined to impress upon it her position as true commander-in-chief. She was sure that misfortune would befall this beloved section of her subjects, that the Liberals wanted to reduce it in numbers and in power, and her fear was heightened by the inclusion of Joseph Chamberlain, popularly regarded as a Socialist, in the Cabinet. He and Dilke were known as the Parliament of Two, because they were inseparable, and each refused office unless the other had some responsible post. “You may make your choice,” said Sir Charles Dilke to Gladstone, “the other shall be leader of the Radicals.”

When her Majesty saw Gladstone she was keen on knowing who was suggested for the War Office, and evidently disapproved on hearing the name of Childers, who in the earlier Liberal administration had been at the Admiralty. So the Queen wooed the Army. On July 13, 1880, she reviewed 11,000 Volunteers in Hyde Park; on the 28th the colours of the 24th Regiment, lost at Isandhlwana but afterwards recovered, were taken to her at Osborne, and in the presence of the officers she decorated them with a wreath. Before the first battalion of the Rifle Brigade started for India, August 21, she visited it on board the troopship _Jumna_, inspected their quarters and was solicitous for their comfort. In 1881 she held a review in Queen’s Park, Edinburgh, of 40,000 Scottish Volunteers under difficult circumstances, for the rain descended in torrents; she, however, remained to the end, and for three hours let the rain pelt upon her, so that by the time she got back to Holyrood her carriage contained a pool of water, and streams of it ran off her skirt.

She kept a watchful eye over Childers, disapproving every suggested reform, and setting herself strongly against all reorganization. In her fear of change she identified herself with all that had been, standing up for old abuses; as Sir Sidney Lee says, “No military reform escaped her censorious vigilance.” She even went so far as to disapprove of the abolition of the use of the “cat” as a punishment. This abuse had gradually diminished, but an officer could still order fifty lashes with the cat to be inflicted on the bare back, and scandals arose in the case of bad-tempered officers. Part of her letter ran: The Queen hopes “that officers on service may not be deprived of the only power they possess of keeping young troops in order, viz. by inflicting corporal punishment in the extreme cases of cowardice, treachery, plundering, or neglect of duty on sentry. The Queen hates the system of flogging, but sees no alternative in extreme cases on active service.”

The punishment was, however, abolished in 1881.

We are wiser about punishment in this generation, though it is only a few months since that Lord Charles Beresford sought to glorify this brutalization of men.

When it was desired to abolish the abuse of distributing Army rank and pay as rewards to those whose qualifications were invisible, Victoria strongly opposed it, saying that if there were abuses they could easily be remedied. A case in point was that of a General Macdonald, who had never done military duty as a general, but had for many years been private secretary to the Duke of Cambridge. To his honours had been added the title and pay--to the amount of £1000 a year--of honorary colonel, and a question was asked in the House of Commons about it. The Queen, then at Balmoral, wrote Childers a long letter demanding that he would not pledge himself to any reform in this matter, saying that she was strongly opposed to the abolition of those honorary colonelcies, that to abolish them would be to destroy all _esprit de corps_ and to weaken the pride which the officers feel in the regiments. How could she have attained to such a conclusion, seeing the facts of the case? What _esprit de corps_ could there be between a regiment and an honorary colonel who was in reality a secretary?

There was delay in posting this letter, so her Majesty telegraphed in cipher to the War Minister. The telegram arrived too late, the question having been asked and answered; but Childers wrote to her, saying that, had he received it in time, his answer would have been more vague. Yet we are often told that the Queen did not influence the Government.

When in the winter of that year Childers prepared a scheme for linking battalions and associating the names of counties or towns with regiments, he again found himself faced with an annoyed and forbidding Queen.

The plan was pushed through, however, and resulted in an immediate accession of recruits; and Childers, driven to desperation by the unceasing and unintelligent heckling both in Parliament and from the Throne, put his position plainly before the country in a speech at Pontefract, on January 19, 1882. It was a justification of the British constitutional attitude as against the German claim that the monarch is in absolute command of the Army. To such men as Gladstone and Childers, strong, self-assertive and determined, the English people owe a great debt of gratitude for the saving of our army from relapsing into an inefficient body, given over to obsolete custom and ruled by those whose only claim was that of high descent.

In the course of the speech referred to Childers said: “It is said that the Secretaries of State for War are encroaching on the functions of others. The Army, they say, is the army of the Crown; we Secretaries of State want to make it the army of the Commons. The Crown, they say, commands the Army through the commander-in-chief; the Secretary of State is a mere financial officer who has gradually intruded on the province of the Crown. All this is mere delusion. The Queen is the head of the Army, the head of the Navy and of every branch of the public service; as such she can do no wrong. But that is because all her acts are the acts of her responsible ministers. The doctrine of personal government which you have seen so undisguisedly claimed in Prussia is absolutely unknown in our Constitution.... Under the Secretary of State are three departments, the heads of which are equally responsible to him. The Chief Officer Commanding, for the Military Department; the Surveyor-General, for the Ordnance and Supply Department; and the Financial Secretary for the Finance Department. To say that the Secretary of State has no controlling power in such matters, when he is responsible to Parliament for any improper exercise of the Queen’s prerogative in regard to them, is manifestly absurd.”

The Queen’s greatest anxiety at the beginning of the new Government was that it should carry on the same foreign policy as its forerunner; especially that it should bring to a close in a glorious manner the two wars. A great majority, however, clamoured for the recall of Sir Bartle Frere, and every one was dumb with surprise to find Gladstone deciding to retain him at his post. There were two reasons for this: the one he gave was that steps to confederation were being taken, and Frere must stay to complete the scheme. The second reason--which he did not give--was that Victoria did not cease to urge upon him her confidence in the commander, and her desire for what she regarded as a strong policy. The enemy by this time were no longer Zulus, but Boers. The royal chagrin was bitter when Frere was recalled in July, and still more bitter when, after many vicissitudes, a peace was concluded the following year without its being secured at the point of the sword.

Over Afghanistan her distress was even keener, for the decision of the Government was to return to the original Anglo-Indian policy which had been found successful before the war. So Lord Roberts’ brave march to Kabul, and thence to the relief of the British at Kandahar, was followed by the appointment of a new Amir and the evacuation of the country by the British, a policy which has so far proved a good one.

This withdrawing after such a desperate attempt to annex Afghanistan to India was a terrible grievance to Victoria, and she refused to discuss it with her ministers. Lord Hartington said, after an interview in October 1880, that she was very gracious, but avoided talking about Kandahar with him, and he feared she was getting into the habit of refusing to talk over with her ministers any subject which was unpalatable to her. Lord Esher commented upon this that there was probably some wisdom in it, as she knew that she or the Ministry must give way, and that she had no chance against a united Cabinet.

When the decision was carried into effect Victoria could not bring herself to face it squarely, and absolutely refused to allow her ministers to publish the matter, which threw them into an awkward predicament in January 1881, when the Queen’s Speech was being prepared. The country had a right to know so important an event, and to let it leak out through report rather than in the legitimate way was sufficient to discredit any Parliament. On Gladstone including in the speech that Kandahar had been evacuated, she telegraphed from Osborne that she strongly objected to it; her ministers replied that four months had elapsed since the withdrawal, and it was absolutely necessary to announce the fact now; to which she returned that she would agree to a modified form of words which did _not_ announce our withdrawal.

Hartington and Gladstone did not know what to do; should they go to Osborne and see what could be done with this autocratic personage, or should they further prorogue Parliament until she had the courage to face the universal knowledge? At that very hour a Privy Council was being held at Osborne, and Sir Henry Ponsonby declared that he had never seen her Majesty so angry as she was then. Possibly the Privy Councillors, met to discuss the speech, helped to cause this anger, and also helped to induce a more reasonable frame of mind, for at six o’clock a telegram was put into Gladstone’s hands giving assent.

With Gladstone’s Government came trouble in Egypt. When England acquired a monetary interest in that country it was necessary to have some control over Egyptian finance, which Beaconsfield had found in a bankrupt condition. French influence had for long been strong in the country, and in 1879 the Dual Control of Finance (England and France) had been instituted. But Turkey was bankrupt in her influence also, having ruled with her usual injustice and barbarity, so the whole great land of Egypt and the Sudan was ripe for rebellion. The army under Arabi Pasha started the revolution, and England’s lack of real knowledge of the country caused this to be regarded as a mere military revolt. There was a massacre at Alexandria, and when Britain prepared to restore order by bombarding the town, the French fleet refused to act with it and steamed away. Gladstone declared that the Sultan must see after his own possessions. France suggested a European Conference, and the Sultan of Turkey, fearing that he would get short shrift at the hands of Europe, and regarding England as his friend through thick and thin, always ready to pull his chestnuts out of the fire for him, refused to have anything to do with a Conference and made the offer to England that it should take exclusive control of Egyptian administrative affairs. Gladstone and Granville, horrified at the idea that they were to spend valuable time, money and men in reducing a Turkish province to order for Turkey, refused pointblank and without consulting their Cabinet. The very thought must have been horrible to Gladstone.

It is easy to see how this high-handed action provoked the Queen, who was so willing to favour Turkey, and who, imbued with the Beaconsfieldian policy of Empire extension, would have taken all that was offered, at whatever cost, in the hope that it would lead to more. So there was a sharp disagreement between her and Gladstone at the very outset, a disagreement which widened and deepened over Egypt until Victoria regarded Gladstone much as he looked upon the Sultan, as “the greatest murderer in Europe.”

The Queen did not cease to press the policy of her late minister upon her new Cabinet, and she endured mental tortures for fear that her efforts would be of no avail. She turned again to the Army, demanding that the smallest details should be submitted to her, for she distrusted Childers, especially now that it was necessary to put down Arabi Pasha before anything else could be thought of. A commander-in-chief of the expedition had to be chosen, and she refused to sanction any appointment until she had diligently studied the careers and qualities of all her chief soldiers, eventually agreeing to the Cabinet’s choice of Lord Wolseley. She worried over transports, rations, hospitals, equipments; she wrote and telegraphed incessantly to the War Office, sending one day as many as seventeen letters! in fact, she did not cease to inform her already harassed and hard-working servants that they knew nothing of their work, and must be given her unsleeping surveillance.

It is needless to say that Childers was loyalty itself, but it would have been interesting on the seventeen-letter day to have heard his language, say at the tenth letter. After that his sensibilities must have become blunted, and his overcharged feelings too congested for expression.

In all this getting ready what had become of her Majesty’s deputy, her cousin the Duke of Cambridge, that she did the overlooking herself? She had evidently come to regard him as an inefficient screen between her and her Ministry, and indeed he never had been strong. Like so many military and royal Germans, his mind was burdened with straps and buckles and lace. The present Kaiser has always been keen over these things, spending earnest thought and much talk over the relative importance of two, or three, buttons on some part of a uniform, as to whether a strap should be four inches or four and a half inches long, and such stupendous trifles. Like his father, the Duke of Cambridge was noted for talking loudly in public places, and was far more audible often at the theatre than were the actors; and like many men who have been stay-at-home soldiers, his ideas upon military matters were somewhat hazy. He loyally upheld his royal cousin in holding fast to ancient custom, and when, after the lesson taught during this first Egyptian campaign, it was suggested and pressed that the betraying scarlet uniform should be abolished, he offered what some outspoken person called “a senseless opposition”; saying that he thought it good for the soldier in action that he should be visible to the enemy. He was, with equal reason, totally against raising the standard of age to nineteen.

Victoria had insisted that her son, the Duke of Connaught, should lead the Guards’ Brigade, and that the Duke of Teck should have a responsible post on Wolseley’s staff, so in addition to the constant fussing over everything that had any relation to the war, the Queen was also anxious about her son. “My nerves were strained to such a pitch by the intensity of my anxiety and suspense that they seemed to feel as though they were all alive.”

Tel-el-Kebir was fought and won, and her Majesty celebrated it as she had years before celebrated the fall of Sebastopol, with a bonfire on the top of Craig Gowan and many other rejoicings, writing in her journal--

“Felt unbounded joy and gratitude for God’s great goodness and mercy.”

It was natural that she should say and think this--but now, since the beginning of the Great War, it is only possible to feel that to join the name of the Christian’s God with war at all is a blasphemy. Kaiser William has shown us that the only god of War is a revolting devil.

When the Egyptian Campaign was over Queen Victoria rewarded her three relatives for their share in it, the Duke of Cambridge being appointed personal aide-de-camp to herself, which, as his work had been entirely hidden by her Majesty’s own industry, was, as some paper wrote, “like decorating the King of the Unknown Regions for his share in the Transit of Venus. Practically he did as much in the one event as in the other.” A comic paper stated that while our troops were winning Tel-el-Kebir, the Duke, “aware somehow of fighting, rose two hours earlier than usual, shouldered his umbrella, charged an imaginary enemy at the head of imaginary troops and fell with an imaginary bullet in his shoulder.” The Duke had been accused of going on parade on a wet day with his umbrella up, and so that useful domestic article was never forgotten when any story was to be told against him. Thus the next year, when the trooping of the colours was countermanded by him because of the rain, the comment was, “The troops were ready, the public were waiting, but all were told to go home. Was a certain historical umbrella necessary?”

The Duke of Connaught had been mentioned three times in dispatches, was given the C.B., and received the thanks of Parliament. Yet a sceptical public had much to say over a report that he had been well guarded, that by order of a “high personage his troops had been so arranged at the battle as to prevent him from incurring danger.” This naturally caused lively indignation in royal circles, and both Wolseley and Childers emphatically denied its truth, the former saying, “He took his chance like any one else.” But the public were not convinced, and there was some excuse for this when one remembers the question addressed to Lieutenant Carey after the killing of the Prince Imperial--

“Where is the Prince?”

“Dead, sir.”

“Then why are you alive?”

This was sufficient to destroy reliance on the word of a superior officer on any such matters, for people naturally felt that such would protect his own reputation by putting such a precious charge as a royal prince in a safe corner.

Victoria also thoughtfully devised the decoration of the Royal Red Cross for nurses who had shown great service, which was bestowed upon four nurses, also upon Princess Louise, the Duchess of Albany and Princess Frederica of Hanover for their services in the First-Aid Society for sick and wounded soldiers. She distributed medals and reviewed the returned troops. Her keen desire was for the drastic punishment of Arabi and the other principal rebels. “The whole state of Egypt is full of difficulties, and we must take great care that, short of annexation, our position is firmly established there, and that we shall not have to shed precious blood and expend much money for nothing,” was one of her exhortations.

Arabi Pasha was a rebel against the unutterable cruelty of the Turks; his movement “was in essence, a genuine revolt against misgovernment” and “was not essentially anti-European,” said Evelyn Baring (Lord Cromer). He had headed a national movement against a foreign oppressor, and the Government could not force itself to carrying out the extreme measures urged by Victoria. He was brought to trial and condemned to death by the Egyptian Government, but Lord Dufferin, preventing the carrying out of the capital sentence, sent him to Ceylon, whence he returned after some years and died in Egypt.

Gladstone felt a great repugnance against burdening the country with any aggressive policy in Egypt; yet it was evident that peace in Egypt could only be secured by the retention of a British force there. Lord Dufferin recommended the formation of a native force of about 6000 men with a proportion of British officers, and a semi-military gendarmerie of 4,400 men. Evelyn Wood became Sirdar of the former and Valentine Baker was made Inspector-General of the latter, the intention being to train native soldiers to do Egyptian work for Egypt, and that England should gradually evacuate a country to which its only right was the desire of the Sultan to shift his burdens upon her shoulders. The Queen strongly resented the idea of evacuation, but could do nothing.

The revolt of the Arabs, however, continued; it had but moved its location from Egypt to the Sudan. The tribes in that vast region were regarded simply as a slave nursery by Turkey and as material for taxation. The people, forced to grow corn for their oppressors, died of starvation themselves. Thus, when the Mahdi came to the front as their deliverer, he at once secured an enormous army. The Khedive now wanted England to extend her assistance and reconquer the Sudan for him. Evelyn Baring advised against it; the Government saw no reason for saddling England with such a burden, but Victoria, dreaming of an African empire as large as that of India, did not cease to urge the sending out of armies.

In January 1883 an Englishman, Hicks Pasha, had been dispatched by the Egyptian authorities, entirely against his own military judgment, with 10,000 Egyptian troops against the Mahdi, and the army had been practically annihilated, upon which our Government proposed sending a Governor-General, meaning Charles Gordon, “which, if it had been accepted, would have saved the Sudan from anarchy and rebellion, and England from expense in life and money, but the Egyptian Government declined his services.”[22]

At this time over the millions of miles of the Sudan the tribes roamed at will, but there were some small towns, more or less fortified, in which were located forces of Egyptian soldiers and some Europeans who had gone there for trading or other purposes; and, as in 1874 and 1878, Gordon had been Governor-General under the Egyptian Government of some of the provinces, he was more liked by the Arabs than by the Turks.

The Government felt that their evacuation plan was the best that could be devised, but first the isolated garrisons must be extricated, and, in spite of Egypt’s refusal of Gordon, they asked him if he could do this work. During those two years and after it was quite easy to allocate blame, to fasten it, as the Queen did, upon one man, but it is time now that the matter should at least be studied from both sides and not from party feeling, or personal prejudice. Gordon knew the Sudan as intimately--and the intimacy was of the slenderest--as such a huge country could be known at that time, and when at twenty-four hours’ notice he started from England on his mission, in January 1884, he said--

“The Mahdi’s forces will fall to pieces of themselves!”

The cause of all the trouble was the want of knowledge on all sides. The Sudan with its heat and cold, its floods and droughts, was an unknown country; the Arab and other forces, the influence of the Mahdi, the aims of the fighters, the character of Gordon himself, all were unknown; even Gordon could not diagnose the case. He himself was not in the slightest understood by the men who sent him. They knew that he had been successful before, that he had an influence in the Sudan, and that every one said he was the man; as far as they could tell he was. Later they knew he was not. Energetic, upright, religious, he was yet subject to enthusiasms which blinded his judgment, he naturally trusted the people about him, and he acted upon his instincts rather than upon reason.

I remember well the terrible excitement about his fate, the bitter denunciations, the unjust charges, but those who knew him best thought afterwards that he was sent too late for his powers to cope with the situation. Here is one example of his want of stability of idea. In an interview given, just before starting, to a representative of _The Pall Mall Gazette_ he said--

“There is one subject on which I cannot imagine any one can differ. This is the impolicy of announcing our intention to evacuate Khartoum. Even if we were bound to do so we should have said nothing about it. The moment it is known that we have given up the game every man will go over to the Mahdi. All men worship the rising sun.... The difficulties of evacuation will be enormously increased, if indeed the withdrawal of our garrison is not rendered impossible.”

No sooner, however, was he in the midst of the disturbed country than he repudiated this by calling the authorities together at Berber on February 13th, announced to them the intention of abandoning the Sudan, and followed this by drawing up a proclamation appointing six of the most influential men to administer the government of the province, subject to the Governor-General. The whole of the notables present at the meeting threw their interest on the side of the Mahdi as opportunity arose.

Gordon’s one mission was to bring the garrisons away, yet no sooner was he in Egypt than he added to this programme the intention of forming a provisional Government for the Sudan, and stuck to this to the end, refusing to leave Khartoum until this impossible task was accomplished.

In his earlier period of authority Gordon had earned the hatred of a man named Zobeir, by putting down a revolt, thus causing the execution of Zobeir’s son and the loss of property to him. On reaching Egypt this time he met Zobeir, and for fear of complications asked the Egyptian Government to send the old rebel to Cyprus out of the way. This was refused, and Gordon thought the safest plan would then be to take Zobeir to Khartoum with him. Those, however, who saw the hatred in the Arab’s eyes, judged that such a course would mean the death of one of the two men, and Zobeir was kept in Cairo. Gordon must have known that Zobeir was a man of power, the man to lead his countrymen, and later urgently begged the English Government to send him out to Khartoum as Governor-General. The Egyptian government supported this, but our Cabinet, wanting Gordon to confine himself to his mission, and knowing Zobeir to be a great slave-dealer, refused.

Thus Gordon, by changing his policy, and the English ministers, by not changing theirs, each contributed to the final result.

The revealing of his hand shut the Sudan to Gordon, and a little more than a month after his arrival in Khartoum the tribes all around had joined the Mahdi. He had in the first weeks sent away 2,500 people, but he still had with him nearly 10,000 troops, there being left in the town at the end about 4000 Bashi-Bazouks, nearly 3000 irregulars, and many black soldiers.

In April 1884 there was a strong desire to send a relief expedition out, and Gladstone was in favour of sending cavalry to Berber to ensure Gordon’s safety, but the Cabinet decided against it.

Great pressure was put on the Government by the Queen, by the Opposition and by the people, until at last an expedition was decided upon. Then was fought “the battle of the routes,” when the generals sat in council in London and squabbled with unabated tenacity for month after month whether the force should go up the Nile or through the desert, so it was August before a start was made, and at long last the passage up the Nile began.

In Gordon’s Journal there are many curious passages about the expedition. In September he wrote: “I think I can say truly that I never asked for a British expedition.” In October he asked what it was coming out for, saying he could not understand it. If it was for the purpose of relieving him he deprecated it; he could get away at any time, adding that if it did reach Khartoum he would not go away with it unless he could take the whole garrison with him. “No one can judge of the waste of money and expense of life in the present expedition; it is an utter waste of both, but it is due to the indecision of the Government.” “If the Europeans like to go to the Equator I will give them steamers, but I will not leave these people after all they have gone through.” “I decline to agree that the expedition comes for my relief; it comes for the relief of the garrisons, which I failed to accomplish. I expect her Majesty’s Government are in a precious rage with me for holding out and forcing their hand.”

He frequently gave the people in Khartoum permission to join the Mahdi, and gradually about 20,000 drifted away, leaving 14,000 in all in the town.

For six months the Mahdi’s army was stationed around them waiting, and the garrison’s food was getting very low. But when Gordon knew that the British force was nearing him he ordered that the greater part of it should be sent to Berber, and thus it was a comparatively small number which at last got to Khartoum. What Gordon knew the Mahdi knew, and two days before the arrival of the British, the latter judged that it was time to strike. By treachery or by attack his troops entered the town and Gordon was shot.

“Too late!” screamed every one as they turned to rend the Government and in especial to rend Gladstone. But late was not really the word. Had the expedition arrived months earlier the result would probably have been the same, and in no case could the relief column have carried sufficient food to help the garrison to march away. There were so many “ifs” in the whole matter, and applicable no less to Gordon himself than to the English Government and the English generals.

Gordon’s temperament appealed to the public, and, combined with his religion, his championship of a forlorn hope and his long resistance of the wild desert forces, enshrined him in the national imagination as a hero and a martyr. It was a time of emotion, not of thought, and even now the generation of that day will refuse to recognize anything but the emotional aspect.

Of all the Queen gave way most unrestrainedly to her emotions. Her first act was to send a telegram to Gladstone and Lord Hartington, not in cypher as usual but in plain English--a small and unworthy act--blaming them entirely for what had happened, saying that it was too fearful to realize that the fall of Khartoum might have been prevented and many precious lives saved if they had taken earlier action. She put the whole burden on her Prime Minister’s shoulders, and saw in him nothing less than a murderer.

She wrote also to Miss Gordon, the general’s sister, a letter filled with regret, grief, anger and extravagance. “_How_ shall I write to you or how shall I attempt to express _what I feel_? To _think_ of your dear, noble, heroic brother, who served his country and his Queen so truly, so heroically, with a self-sacrifice so edifying to the world, to think that he was not saved! That the promises of help were not kept--promises of which I _so often_ and _so constantly_ reminded those who should have fulfilled them; ah! it is to me _grief_ inexpressible. Indeed it has made me ill.... Would you express to your other sisters and your elder brother my true sympathy, and what I do so keenly feel--the _stain_ left upon England for your dear brother’s cruel, though heroic fate.”

Miss Gordon sent her brother’s Bible as a present to the Queen, and in July sent his diary for her Majesty’s perusal. The reading of it, with the curious evidence it gives of the writer’s character, his changeability and obstinacy, in no way modified her admiration for him, and she wrote again of her mortification at the vacillation of her ministers.

Henry Gordon, at the end of his book, “_Events in the Life of Charles G. Gordon_,” put the chief blame on the refusal of the Egyptian Government to accept General Gordon’s help when the British Government offered it in 1883, saying that in that case Gordon would have been in Khartoum by the new year, and have easily then have brought the whole garrison away. But who knows? Charles Gordon might have refused then, as later, to bring any one away until he had carried out his impossible scheme of political reorganization.

Germany’s ruler, Bismarck, greatly enjoyed the contemplation of our trouble, and started one of his periodic attempts to excite German feeling against England, employing Busch, whose greatest joy was in licking the Chancellor-Emperor’s boots, to write articles for the German papers--notably the _Grenzboten_--showing England to be guilty of great crimes. One article dealt with Protection, another with England and China, declaring that by restrictive legislation England had caused famine and cholera in India and was responsible for cholera in West Africa and Europe. England and the Boers, England and Russia were the themes of other of these articles. Busch tells how he and Bucher--one of like kidney--rejoiced together over England’s misfortunes in the Sudan, and the latter expressed the hope that Wolseley’s head would soon arrive in Cairo nicely pickled and packed! He also explains how the Sultan’s refusal to see after his own possessions was influenced by threats from Germany.

The crisis in the Sudan was not concluded by the tragedy of Khartoum; that had to be followed by a decision either to destroy the Mahdi or to evacuate the Sudan altogether. The latter alternative was decided upon, and in April Gladstone wrote to the Queen, who was then abroad, and she replied with a vehement protest against the decision, saying that it would affect our position in India, and demanding that Wolseley and our political representative in Egypt, Evelyn Baring (since Lord Cromer) should have an absolutely free hand to do what they thought. To her first objection it could only be pointed out that India alone demanded the policy decided upon, for Russia, believing Britain fully occupied in the Sudan, was again attacking Afghanistan; and the second was answered by Baring sending a spontaneous recommendation that the Sudan be abandoned.

When Britain’s need was defence, the Government was quick enough to act, and in the Afghan quarrel steps were at once taken which considerably helped the settlement of the matter by negotiation.