Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt

My reason for going on to India, after the severe journey we had just made, was that on our arrival at Bushire we had found letters awaiting us from Lord Lytton, who had for many years been my most intimate friend, inviting us to pay him a visit at Simla. Lytton, of whose endearing personal qualities I need here say nothing, for I have already paid that tribute to his beloved memory, had been like myself in the diplomatic service, and I had served with him at Lisbon in 1865, and we had written poetry and lived together in an intimacy which had been since continued. Now in 1879 he had been a little over two years Viceroy in India, and at the time we arrived at Simla was just bringing his first Afghan campaign to a successful conclusion, and he signed the Treaty of Gandamak in the first month of our staying with him. Lytton, who was a man of very superstitious temperament, though a rationalist in his religious beliefs, spent much of his spare time during the war, hard worker though he was, in making fire-balloons which he launched at intervals, arguing from their quick or slow ascensions good or bad fortune to his army. Not that he allowed such results to decide his action, for he was a steady worker and sound reasoner, but it soothed his nerves, which were always highly strung, to have these little intimations of a supernatural kind in which he persuaded himself half to believe. He connected my coming to Simla with the good turn the war had taken, and looked upon me as a fortunate influence as long as I was with him. He made me the confidant of all his thoughts, and from him I learned many interesting things in the region of high politics which I need not here particularize, though some of them will be found embodied in this memoir. With my Arabian ideas, as a man of romance and a poet, he at once professed his sympathy, and gave instructions to Sir Alfred Lyall, who was then his Foreign Secretary, to talk the matter over with me and give me all possible information.

The Indian Government was at that time not at all disinclined to make a forward movement in the Persian Gulf. There had been for many years past a kind of protectorate exercised by the Indian Navy of the Arabian seaports, a protectorate which, being rigidly restricted to the prevention of piracy and quarrels between the tribes at sea without any attempt at interfering with them on shore, had been wholly beneficent, and the recent assertion of the Ottoman claim to sovereignty over them was resented at Calcutta. The Sultan Abdul Hamid too had already begun to alarm our authorities by his Pan-Islamic propaganda, which it was thought was affecting the loyalty of the Indian Mohammedans. Ideas, therefore, of Arab independence were agreeable to the official view, and Sir Alfred Lyall reported well of mine to Lytton, so well that there was a plan half agreed to between us that I should return the following winter to Nejd and should be the bearer of a complimentary message from the Viceroy to Ibn Rashid. I am glad now, with my better knowledge of the ways of the Indian Government, that this proposal led to no practical result. I see plainly that it would have placed me in a false position, and that with the best will in the world to help the Arabs and serve the cause of freedom I might have made myself unconsciously the instrument of a policy tending to their subjugation. It is one of the evils of the English Imperial system that it cannot meddle anywhere among free people, even with quite innocent intentions, without in the end doing evil. There are too many selfish interests always at work not to turn the best beginnings into ill endings.

These matters, however, were not the only ones I discussed with Lytton and his subordinates. Sir John Strachey, his finance minister, put me through a course of instruction on Indian finance and Indian economics, the methods of dealing with famines, the land revenue, the currency, the salt tax, and the other large questions then under discussion – Strachey being the chief official advocate of what was called the forward policy in public expenditure – and with the unexpected result that my faith, up to that moment strong in the honesty of the Indian Government, as the faithful guardian of native interests, was rudely shaken. The following extracts from letters written by me at the time from Simla will show how this short glimpse of India at headquarters was affecting me: "I am disappointed," I wrote, "with India, which seems just as ill-governed as the rest of Asia, only with good intentions instead of bad ones or none at all. There is just the same heavy taxation, government by foreign officials, and waste of money one sees in Turkey, only, let us hope, the officials are fools instead of knaves. The result is the same, and I don't see much difference between making the starving Hindoos pay for a cathedral at Calcutta and taxing Bulgarians for a palace on the Bosphorus. Want eats up these great Empires in their centralized governments, and the only way to make them prosper would be to split them up and let the pieces govern themselves." Also to another friend, Harry Brand, Radical Member of Parliament, now Lord Hampden, "The natives, as they call them, are a race of slaves, frightened, unhappy, and terribly thin. Though a good Conservative and a member of the Carlton Club I own to being shocked at the Egyptian bondage in which they are held, and my faith in British institutions and the blessings of British rule have received a severe blow. I have been studying the mysteries of Indian finance under the 'best masters,' Government secretaries, commissioners, and the rest, and have come to the conclusion that if we go on developing the country at the present rate the inhabitants will have, sooner or later, to resort to cannibalism, for there will be nothing but each other left to eat. I do not clearly understand why we English take their money from these starving Hindoos to make railroads for them which they don't want, and turnpike roads and jails and lunatic asylums and memorial buildings to Sir Bartle Frere, and why we insist upon their feeding out of their wretched handfulls of rice immense armies of policemen and magistrates and engineers. They want none of these things, and they want their rice very badly, as anybody can see by looking at their ribs. As to the debt they have been saddled with, I think it would be honester to repudiate it, at least as a Debt on India. I never could see the moral obligation governments acknowledge of taxing people for the debts they, and not the people, have incurred. All public debts, even in a self-governing country, are more or less dishonest, but in a foreign despotism like India they are a mere swindle."

On the whole, this brief visit to India at headquarters had considerable influence with me in the shaping of my ideas on the larger questions of Imperial policy, and giving them the direction they afterwards took. I still believed, but with failing faith, in the good intentions, if no longer in the good results, of our Eastern rule, and I thought it could be improved and that the people at home would insist upon its being improved if they only knew.

One of my last recollections of my two months' stay with Lytton at Peterhoff, as the Viceregal residence was then called at Simla, was of a dinner at which I sat next to Cavagnari the evening before he set out on his fatal mission to Kabul. He was an interesting man, the grandson, so he told me, of a Venetian merchant who, when the French Republican army occupied Venice, lent a large sum of money to Bonaparte, which was never repaid. The Emperor, however, rewarded him by making his son his private secretary, who became a devoted adherent of the Imperial family. Lewis Napoleon Cavagnari, the grandson, was also a strong Bonapartist, and believed himself, on account of his name, to have before him a very high destiny. He had faith in his "star," and I can testify that in his talk to me that night – and it was long and intimate – the last thing he seemed to think of was failure or danger in his mission. Yet only a few days before he must have had an admonition in the tragic news, of which we also talked, of the Prince Imperial's death in South Africa. When we parted it was with an engagement on my part and on my wife's that we would go in the autumn to visit him at Kabul. "You must not come, however," he said, "before the autumn, because I shall not have got the Residency comfortable or fit to receive ladies." Of any more dangerous reason he gave us no kind of hint.

Another acquaintance at that time with whom a tragic history is connected was Colley, then Lytton's military secretary, who the year following was to die on Majuba Hill. Lytton had the highest possible opinion of his military talents, and between them they had in large measure directed the Afghan campaign from Simla. His fault was, I think, too great self-confidence and too much ambition. He occupied Majuba because he could not bear to let the campaign end without gaining some personal success. Melgund again, who is now Lord Minto, Pole-Carew, and Brabazon, Lytton's aides-de-camp, were all three, with Lord Ralph Kerr, among our friends of that time, and Plowden and Batten, the husbands of their two fair wives. We made the voyage back from Bombay in Melgund's company and that of Major Jack Napier, leaving India on the 12th of July in full monsoon and arriving at Suez on the 25th, and on the same day by train to Alexandria.

I think it was at Aden, as we passed it to the Red Sea, that we learned the great news of the day in Egypt, the deposition of the Khedive Ismaïl, a subject to us of great rejoicing, and no sooner had we arrived at Alexandria than I learned the full details of his share in the affair from that other intimate friend of my diplomatic days, Frank Lascelles, whom I found acting Consul-General at the British Agency. What he told me does not differ much from the account of it officially published, and I need not repeat it here. What, however, is not generally known is the part played in it by the Rothschilds, which Lascelles did not at that time know but which I heard later from Wilson. Wilson, indeed, was able to boast that through these he had had his full revenge. On his return, he told me, from Egypt, crestfallen and abandoned by his own Government, he had gone straight to the Rothschilds at Paris and had represented to them the danger their money was running from the turn affairs had taken at Cairo and Alexandria. The Khedive intended to repudiate his whole debt and to shelter himself in doing so by proclaiming Constitutional government in Egypt. If they did not prevent this, all would be lost. He thus succeeded in alarming the Rothschilds and in getting them to use the immense political influence they possessed in favour of active intervention. At first, however, they had pulled the strings both at Downing Street and on the Quai d'Orsay in vain. The English Government was no longer in an intervening mood, trouble having broken out for them in South Africa; and at Paris, too, there was an equal unwillingness. In despair for their millions the Rothschilds then made supplication at Berlin to Bismarck, who ever since his Frankfort days had extended a certain contemptuous protection to the great Hebrew house, and not in vain. The French and English Governments were given to understand by the then all-powerful Chancellor that if they were unable to intervene effectively in Egypt in the bond-holders' interests the German Government would make their cause its own. This settled the matter, and it was agreed that, as the least violent form of intervention, the Sultan should be applied to to depose his too recalcitrant vassal. To the last moment Ismaïl refused to believe that the Porte, on which he had lavished so many millions and was still appealing cash in hand – for he had hidden treasures – would desert him. The pressure from Europe was too great. Wilson claims to have had the question of Ismaïl's successor submitted to him as between Halim, whom the Sultan much preferred, and Tewfik, and to have decided in favor of the latter as being known to him to be of weak character and so the more convenient political instrument. But be that as it may, the fatal telegram was despatched conveying to Ismaïl the news of his fall, and that his Viceregal functions had passed away from him to his son. It had been Lascelles' disagreeable duty to convey the news to the old tyrant of eighteen irresponsible and ruinous years. True to his rapacious habit, his last act had been to deplete the treasury of its current account and to gather together all the valuables he could anywhere lay hands on, and so retire to his yacht, the "Mahroussa," with a final spoil of his Egyptian subjects amounting, it is said, to three millions sterling. Nobody had cared to hinder him or inquire, or bid him stay even for an hour.

CHAPTER IV
ENGLISH POLITICS IN 1880

Cavagnari's tragical death at Kabul, which took place before the summer of 1879 was over, a disaster which involved Lytton in a new war and endless political trouble, effectually ended any projects we had made of fresh travel for that year, either in Afghanistan or Arabia. I spent, therefore, a full twelve months in England, the busiest as yet in some ways of my life. Up to that date, though I was now in my fortieth year, I had not only taken no public part in politics, but I had never so much as made a speech to an audience or written an article for a review, or a letter to a newspaper. Constitutionally shy in early life I had shrunk from publicity in any shape, and the diplomatic training I had had had only aggravated my repugnance to being en évidence. Diplomacy, whether it has or has not anything to hide, always affects secrecy and entertains a distrust of public speaking and an extreme jealousy of the indiscretions of the Press. Now, however, having persuaded myself that I had a mission in the Oriental world, however vague and ill defined, I began to talk and write, and even overcame my timidity to the extent of appearing once or twice upon a platform. The first occasion on which I ever thus spoke was at a meeting of the British Association at Sheffield on the 22nd of August, to which I was invited as a distinguished traveller in the company of M. Serpa Pinto, M. de Brazza, and Captain Cameron, all of African fame, and where I opposed Cameron's advocacy of a Euphrates Valley Railroad. I was able to speak on this matter with more authority than he, for, though he had gone out with much beating of drums the year before to explore the route, he had turned back from the difficult part of it – that which lay between Bagdad and Bushire – while we had made the whole route from sea to sea; and I followed up my opposition in an article on the same subject, the first I ever wrote, in the "Fortnightly Review." John Morley was at that time editor of the "Fortnightly," and I had an introduction to him from Lytton, and managed to interest him in my Eastern ideas. Both these little ventures with speech and pen brought me credit and encouraged me to do more in the direction of what was now my propaganda. I was busy too with poetry; and, again, I had my wife's book of travels, "A Pilgrimage to Nejd," to arrange and edit. The multiplied work occupied me fully all the winter.

With home politics I troubled myself not at all, though it was a time of crisis, and Gladstone, with the General Election of 1880 at hand, was in the full fervour of his Midlothian preaching. My sympathies, as far as England was concerned, were still rather with the Tories, and on Oriental questions I looked upon Gladstone, little as I loved the Turks, as an ignoramus and fanatic. My personal friends, with the exception of two or three, Harry Brand and Eddy Hamilton, were all Tories, and my love for Lytton covered in my eyes the worst of Disraeli's Imperial sins. I clung to the thought that England in the East might yet, through the Cyprus Convention properly interpreted, be made an instrument for good, and I was swayed backwards and forwards in regard to her Imperial position by opposing hopes and fears. It was not till I had cleared my thoughts by putting them into print that I gradually came to any settled plan. One great pre-occupation, too, I had that year in the establishment of my stud of Arab horses at Crabbet, about which I was in constant correspondence with the world of sport, including a public one with the Jockey Club. Curiously enough, it was in connection with my views on horseflesh that I first came into epistolary communication with Mr. Gladstone. His well-known hobby about ancient Greece had made him curious to learn my opinion about the horses of antiquity, and especially the probable breeding of those of Greece and Troy; and a message was conveyed to me through Mr. Knowles, the editor of the "Nineteenth Century Review," asking a memorandum on their genealogy. This, and the accident of his naming Edward Hamilton, with whom I was intimate, his private secretary when he took office in April in succession to Disraeli, were the links which led to our correspondence later on Egyptian affairs.

A few extracts from a fragmentary journal I began to keep in 1880 will show the chaos of ideas, literary, social, and political in which during that year, I lived. The extracts are only such as have some relation to Eastern affairs, and I find them embedded in a mass of notes recording events of private and ephemeral interest no longer of any value. The first gives a picture of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, for so many years our Ambassador at Constantinople, and who was now living in retirement and extreme old age with his two daughters on the borders of Kent and Sussex:

"March, 1880.– A visit to Lord Stratford de Redcliffe at Frant. Lord Stratford has given me a paper on reforms for Turkey, which he is thinking of sending to the 'Times,' and I read it in bed. It is an old man's work, rambling and vague, with hardly an occasional touch of vigour. Old men should write nothing but their recollections, and Lord S. is ninety-four. A wonderful old man, nevertheless, with a countenance of extreme benignity, a complexion of milk and rose leaves, clear blue eyes, and hair as white as snow. Though rather deaf, he still talks well. I wrote him in return a memorandum with my ideas for Asiatic Turkey, and later spent the morning with him listening to his old-world recollections. He was Chargé d'Affaires at Constantinople when Byron passed through on his Childe Harold journey, and had ridden with him every day for six weeks. Byron had been very agreeable, and there was nothing at that time scabreux in his conversation. He had also (before that) in 1805 met him at Lord's Cricket Ground at the Eton and Harrow match, both of them playing in the elevens on opposite sides. Byron played cricket 'as well as could be expected considering his infirmity.' He, Lord S., had never been willing to think there had ever been anything really wrong between B. and Lady Caroline Lamb. The impression Lord S. gives me is one of extreme kindness, gentleness, and benignity, quite foreign to his reputation. I had rather sit listening to these old-world confessions than to the talk of the prettiest woman in London."

"March 16.– Breakfasted with Rivers Wilson and discussed Colonel Gordon's character. All the world is agreed about his being a very wonderful man. He has ruled the Soudan for four years single-handed, and has repressed the slave trade completely. Now he comes home to England and nothing is done for him. Neither Lord Beaconsfield nor any of the Ministers will so much as see him. He made a mistake at starting (in his relations with them). Passing through Paris (on his way home) he called on Lord Lyons (at the Embassy), and begged him to see to the appointment of a European successor to himself in the Soudan, and in the course of conversation held out the threat that, if the English Government would not do this, he would go to the French Government. Whereupon a correspondence ensued with Lord Lyons, in which Gordon wrote a last very intemperate letter ending in these words: 'I have one comfort in thinking that in ten or fifteen years' time it will matter little to either of us. A black box, six feet six by three feet wide, will then contain all that is left of Ambassador, or Cabinet Minister, or of your humble and obedient servant.' This has stamped him (in official eyes) as a madman. Now he has left Europe, shaking the dust off his feet, for Zanzibar."

This little anecdote is very characteristic of Gordon and is in harmony with much of his correspondence, four years later, with Sir Evelyn Baring. Our officials always detested him, for he habitually violated the rules of their diplomacy and the conventions of their official intercourse. Some thought him mad, others that he drank, and others again that he was a religious fanatic who, when he was in doubt between two courses, consulted his Bible for an oracle, or as a last solution "spun a coin." Not one of them understood or trusted him. At the moment of which I am writing, the early spring of 1880, he was very angry with the English Government for the part it had taken in deposing Ismaïl. Gordon for some reason or other liked Ismaïl, and hated his successor Tewfik, and as soon as he learned at Khartoum what had happened, he had thrown up his Governorship, and was now especially angry because a Turkish pasha, and not a European, had been appointed in his place. Gordon was a man of genius, with many noble qualities, but he was also a bundle of contradictions, and the officials were probably right when they looked upon him as not being at all times quite of a sound mind. This, as will be seen, was the official opinion even at the very moment of his being charged at the Foreign Office with his last mission to Khartoum.

The following, too, of the same date, 16th March, is interesting: "Called on Cardinal Manning. Our conversation was on politics. He asked me which way I should vote at the Elections. I said, 'I should vote only on one consideration, a £5 note,' Cardinal: 'You mean you will not vote at all?' I: 'I can get up no interest in these things. I look upon European civilization as doomed to perish, and all politics as an expedient which cannot materially delay or hasten the end.' Cardinal: 'I take the same view, though probably on different grounds. Europe is rejecting Christianity, and with it the reign of moral law. The reign of force is now beginning again, as in the earliest ages, and bloodshed and ruin must be the result. Perhaps on the ruins the Church may again build up something new.' Talking of Asia, he said that Ralph Kerr had told him that the inhabitants of India attributed the mildness of our rule to fear. They respect the Russians because they govern by military law. I: 'The Russians are Asiatics. They govern in the Asiatic way – by fraud if possible – if not, by force. This Asiatics understand.' Cardinal: 'The Russians, as you say, are Asiatics; and I will tell you more: their Nihilists are Buddhists. Nihilism is a product not of the West, but of the East.'"

The General Elections, it must be remembered, of 1880 were fought to a very large extent on questions of Eastern policy. Gladstone in his Midlothian campaign had attacked with tremendous violence the whole of Disraeli's scheme of imperial expansion, and had denounced as grossly immoral his intervention at Constantinople and Berlin in favour of the Turks, his acquisition of Cyprus, his purchase of the Suez Canal shares, and his aggression on Egypt – as also Lytton's two Afghan campaigns and the Boer War still raging in South Africa. With regard to Egypt, Gladstone had as long before as the year 1877 made known his views in print, and in an article in the August number of the "Nineteenth Century Review" of that year, "Aggression on Egypt and Freedom in the East," had declared himself in the clearest and strongest terms opposed to the undertaking by England of any form of responsibility on the Nile. This article is so remarkable and so wonderfully prescient of evils he was himself destined to inflict upon Egypt that it deserves quoting. He objects in it to such aggression on various grounds: first, as increasing England's burden of Eastern rule, already too great; secondly, because extensions of imperial rule can only be effected by immoral means; thirdly, as regarded Egypt, that the pretence of protecting the route to India by occupying the Nile Valley was a false one, the route by the Cape of Good Hope being England's true line of communication; and, fourthly, because intervention of any kind, whether on the Suez Canal or at Cairo, must inevitably lead to farther and farther adventures in Africa. "Our first site in Egypt," he writes, "be it by larceny or be it by emption, will be the almost certain egg of a North African Empire that will grow and grow till another Victoria and another Albert, titles of the lake sources of the White Nile, will come within our borders, and till we finally join hands across the Equator with Natal and Cape Town, to say nothing of the Transvaal and the Orange River on the south or of Abyssinia or Zanzibar to be swallowed by way of viaticum on our journey – and then, with a great empire in each of the four quarters of the world … we may be territorially content but less than ever at our ease." He had made also a plea for the continuation of Mohammedan self-government at Cairo. "The susceptibilities which we might offend in Egypt," he says, "are rational and just. For very many centuries she has been inhabited by a Mohammedan community. That community has always been governed by Mohammedan influences and powers. During a portion of the period it had Sultans of its own. Of late, while politically attached to Constantinople, it has been practically governed from within, a happy incident in the condition of any country and one which we should be slow to change. The grievances of the people are indeed great, but there is no proof whatever that they are incurable. Mohammedanism now appears in the light of experience to be radically incapable of establishing a good or tolerable government over civilized and Christian races; but what proof have we that in the case of a Mohammedan community, where there are no adverse complications of blood or religion, or tradition or speech, the ends of political society, as they understand them, may not be passably obtained." Lastly, he had foreseen the quarrel which an attempt by England to seize Egypt would create with France: "My belief is that the day which witnesses our occupation of Egypt will bid a long farewell to all cordiality of political relations between France and England. There might be no immediate quarrel, no exterior manifestation, but a silent, rankling grudge there would be like the now extinguished grudge of America during the Civil War, which awaited the opportunity of some embarrassment on our side and on hers of returning peace and leisure from weightier matters. Nations have long memories." He had ended his article by a solemn warning and an appeal to the hand of the Most High to confound the intrigues of Cabinets, and secure the great emancipation of the East. "No such deliverance," he concludes, "has for centuries blessed the earth. We of this country (England) may feel with grief and pain that we have done nothing to promote it. Whatever happens, may nothing still worse than this lie at our door. Let us hope … that to abdicate duty we may not have to add a chapter of perpetrated wrong."

With these noble declarations, reiterated in a score of speeches during the Election campaign of 1880, I could not but be in sympathy, had it been possible to take them as quite sincere or as representing a policy intended by the Liberal Party to be carried out when they should be in office. But Gladstone did not at that time inspire me with any confidence, and between Whigs and Tories there seemed to me to be but little difference.

"March 20.– John Pollen (then private secretary to Lord Ripon) dined with us. We talked of the Elections and agreed there was not much to choose between Whigs and Tories. I shall not vote. Though Lord Salisbury's policy is less contemptible than Lord Granville's or Gladstone's, it is coquetting too much with the Germans to please me. To bring Germany down to Constantinople would be a greater misfortune than anything Russia can accomplish."

"April 6.– Paris (the Elections being over and having resulted in a large Liberal majority). Godfrey Webb and I breakfasted with Bitters (my cousin Francis Gore Currie), and I then went to the Embassy. Sheffield (Lord Lyon's private secretary) very important about the new Liberal Government – what he said to Hartington, and what Granville said to him. Though I abstain from politics, I confess I think the Gladstonian triumph a great misfortune. They are so strong now that we shall have all sorts of experiments played with our British Constitution. The game laws, the land laws, and all the palladiums will be dismantled. Our policy in Asia will suffer. The Whigs know nothing of the East and will be afraid to reverse the Tory policy, and afraid to carry it logically out. They will try to reform Turkey, and, finding it impossible, will lose their temper and very likely drift into a war. Personally the change is annoying to me, as now Lytton will resign with the Ministry and we shall be baulked of our Indian visit next winter. But all these things are trifles in the march of history."

"April 9.– (Still at Paris.) A letter from Anne full of politics… 'Hartington is to be Premier, Goschen Admiralty, and Gladstone finance … nothing in the foreign policy will be changed! Cyprus kept, Russia thwarted, and Turkey administered from Gallipoli… Lord Ripon does not know his own place, if any. I hear Mme. de Novikoff⁵ still described as the Egeria of Gladstone.'… Dined with Adams (first secretary of the Paris Embassy) and met there Rivers Wilson, who goes to-morrow to Egypt with Dicey, and Arthur Sullivan the composer – all pleasant company." (This was Wilson's final mission in which he arranged the law of liquidation.)