GORDON’S LAST MISSION
THE problem of how, notwithstanding Gordon’s well-known views about the
Soudan and Egypt, and the recollection of his past conflicts with our
diplomacy both at Cairo and in Downing Street, and the belief
entertained there of his madness, he came to be once more employed by
Gladstone’s Government, and sent to Khartoum on a mission ostensibly not
of his own choosing, and then left to perish, is one of perennial
interest, which history has not yet finally solved. It has been
variously dealt with by official apologists as well as by Gordon’s
friends. Morley has given an authoritative version of it in his “Life of
Gladstone,” Fitzmaurice another in his “Life of Granville,” and Cromer
yet a third in his “Modern Egypt”; but they none of them agree; while
opposed to them we have Sir Henry Gordon’s and Egmont Hake’s narratives,
supplemented by Stead’s account of his own part in it, and no few other
annalists who each has added his contribution to the general knowledge.
Above all we have Gordon’s own diary at Khartoum, and we have the Blue
Books, a body of official information bulkier, perhaps, than that
concerning any individual ever employed by the British Government since
Blue Books were first published. Nevertheless I doubt if the whole truth
has yet been told, or the real reasons given, or the responsibility of
failure placed quite on the right shoulders. I will endeavour to supply
the lacking evidence and reconcile the various narratives.
The first official suggestion of Gordon’s re-employment in Egypt seems
to have been due to Sir Charles Wilson, that excellent engineer officer
who, it will be remembered (see “Secret History”) did such good service
to Egypt and the cause of justice at the time of Arabi’s trial. Wilson
was at that time very closely in Lord Dufferin’s confidence, having
served under him as perambulating Consul-General for some years in Asia
Minor; and, being a personal friend and fellow officer of Gordon’s and
better acquainted than any Englishman then at Cairo with Soudanese
affairs, he was consulted by Dufferin on the subject as soon as the
latter arrived in Egypt. The result was a despatch, dated 18th November
1882, in which, after repeating Wilson’s opinion, Dufferin adds: “It can
be understood that the Khedive should be unwilling to abandon a country
with such possibilities of development; and it is probable that, if only
some person like Colonel Gordon could be found to undertake its
administration, fairly good government might be maintained there without
drawing upon Egypt either for men or money. Colonel Gordon I believe has
already broken up and disorganized in a great measure the former centres
of the slave traffic, and the same energy and ability which has gone so
near to effecting this difficult task ought to be sufficient to keep the
country in order.”
Although, as already explained, I do not believe that at that date, and
apart from a change of Khedive and a reconstruction of the National
party at Cairo, Gordon could have effected any permanent settlement of
the Soudan trouble unsupported by an adequate military force from
without, there was still a chance that something of the sort might have
succeeded.
It is just possible that, if Gordon had been sent at once to Khartoum,
and that if, as was being talked of at the end of the year 1882, Wilson
had succeeded Malet at Cairo, and a Nationalist Ministry been
reinstated, even under Tewfik, Gordon might have succeeded in
reconstituting an effective government at Khartoum in opposition to the
Mahdi, though I doubt it for the reasons already given. At any rate the
suggestion was not adopted—it is probable that Riaz and the other Pashas
of the restored regime opposed it[20]—and nothing more came of it than
the sending of Colonel D. H. Stewart to Khartoum “to report,” and a
little later, January 1883, to an offer made by Dufferin to Wilson that
he should himself go to Khartoum as Governor-General. Wilson, I think,
wisely declined this, for it was already too late; and on his refusal
Hicks was entrusted with the thankless task, with the result we have
seen.
Stewart’s report of affairs on arrival at Khartoum proved of the most
pessimistic kind. He placed the Mahdi’s followers at 338,000 men, and
recommended the abandonment of the southern and eastern provinces to
their own chiefs, and Darfour to its original Royal Family. He
pronounced the Egyptians “quite unfit in every way to undertake such a
trust as the government of so vast a country with a view to its
welfare”—and in opposition to Wilson, who believed in the Soudan as a
country of great prospective wealth, he pronounced it to be a financial
burden on Egypt hardly worth retaining.
While mentioning the names of these two distinguished officers, Wilson
and Stewart, who were destined to play each of them a tragic part in the
coming drama of Gordon’s defence of Khartoum, I will say what I remember
of them personally, for it so happened that I met them both at Aleppo in
the summer of 1881. They were travelling together at the time, employed
on special service as consuls in Asia Minor, under the terms of the
Cyprus Convention, and they were both staying, as I was, for some days
in the house of the British Consul. They were men of very different
types and characters. Wilson shared many of Gordon’s characteristics. He
was a serious man, with a large knowledge of the East, and much sympathy
with its peoples, altogether humane and lovable. Like Gordon, he was a
biblical scholar and greatly interested in the topography of such of the
lands in which he travelled as were connected with the Old and New
Testaments. He had served with Palmer and others on the Palestine
Exploration Staff, and was full of learning on the subjects that
interested him. After our meeting at Aleppo he travelled with us to
Scanderoon, and on by sea as far as Smyrna, where we parted company. I
have always retained a very pleasant recollection of him and a high
respect for his character. Stewart, on the other hand, though also a
hard worker and a man of ability, was of a quite different type. He was
a smart young cavalry captain of Hussars, the 11th, with all the
ordinary English officer’s contempt for “natives” and inability to deal
courteously with them. Though I found him an excellent fellow in other
ways, our ideas on the East differed entirely. He was all for the
extension of English authority, and had little sympathy with Orientals.
He was desirous, at the moment, of visiting the Anazeh tribes, from some
of which I had just come, and I gave him letters to two or three of the
leading Anazeh Sheykhs, my friends. But he, after gallopping about the
desert for some weeks with a Turkish escort, gave up his attempt, having
failed to get into pleasant relations with any of them; they “were all,”
he explained to me, “such rogues and liars.” I judge his character by
this. He was a good, active, fearless young Englishman, with all our
English virtues, but too little fellow feeling with ways not English to
succeed in inspiring Eastern confidence. In one of his dispatches from
Khartoum he expresses his “contempt and disgust” for what he holds to be
the “cowardice” of the poor exiled Arabist soldiers at Khartoum, sent to
die in a cause they abhorred. He could not understand their
unwillingness as soldiers to fight.
Lord Cromer’s high opinion of Stewart was justified by the fact that
both in their separate ways were typical of our English intolerance of
Oriental character, and one needs no other explanation than this to
understand how it was that Stewart and Gordon failed to pull together.
Stewart’s death by treachery at Arab hands was one of the minor
tragedies of the Nile campaign. His report, nevertheless, of February
1883, was an able one, and had considerable influence on Soudanese
policy. Dufferin, in his own report, written about the same time as
Stewart’s, adopts more than one of his ideas, and though Dufferin takes
a far more cheerful view of the situation, as was natural in a man of
his hopeful Irish nature, he recommends with Stewart the abandonment of
the western provinces. “Some persons,” says Dufferin, “are inclined to
advise Egypt to withdraw altogether from the Soudan and her other
acquisitions in that region. But she can hardly be expected to acquiesce
in such a policy. Possessing the lower ranges of the Nile, she is
naturally inclined to claim dominion along its entire course; and when
it is remembered that the territories in question, if properly
developed, are capable of producing inexhaustible supplies of sugar and
cotton, we cannot be surprised at her unwillingness to abandon them.
Unhappily, Egyptian administration in the Soudan has been almost
uniformly unfortunate. The success of the present Mahdi . . . is a
sufficient proof of the Government’s inability either to reconcile the
inhabitants to its rule or to maintain order. The consequences have been
most disastrous.” He then goes on to say that he places high hopes on
General Hicks, who has just been appointed Chief of the Staff at
Khartoum, and to suggest the construction of a Souakin to Berber
railway, which would “change all the elements of the problem. . . . The
finances of the Soudan once rehabilitated . . . commerce would
eventually extend the blessings of civilization for some distance
through the surrounding region. I apprehend, however,” he concludes,
“that it would be wise upon the part of Egypt to abandon Darfur, and
perhaps Kordofan, and to be content with maintaining her jurisdiction in
the provinces of Khartoum and Senaar.”
This part of the report, we know from Wilson’s biographer, was
practically Wilson’s own; and we know also that Wilson and Gordon were
at one on the subject, and there can be little doubt that, if Dufferin
had had full power at the date of his report to deal with the Soudan,
and if Wilson had gone there, such would have been his instructions. As
it was, the Foreign Office resolved on doing nothing, and Hicks was left
unaided and undirected. It was not till nine months later that the
question of either Wilson or Gordon was brought forward by Lord
Granville. It came about in this way.
In the fortnight immediately following the news of Hicks’s disaster,
Gordon, who had powerful friends both at Cairo, in Sir Charles Watson
and Sir Evelyn Wood, and at the War Office, in Lord Wolseley and
Reginald Brett (Lord Esher), had his name brought forward, whether
consciously or unconsciously I am not sure, in official circles as a
possible saviour of what was now an almost hopeless situation at
Khartoum. At the War Office it was known that Gordon, though he
considered himself engaged to King Leopold for the Congo, would not in
his secret heart be otherwise than glad to take the affairs of the
Soudan once more in hand. He was beginning to chafe at his long inaction
in the Holy Land, and had a longing for his old life of active
employment; and, at the suggestion probably of Hartington, and perhaps
also of Northbrook, with whom Gordon was in occasional correspondence,
Lord Granville, so we are informed by Fitzmaurice, wrote to Gladstone,
27th November: “Do you see any objection to using Gordon in some way? He
has an immense name in Egypt, he is popular at home, he is a strong but
very sensible opponent of slavery, he has a small bee in his bonnet. If
you do not object I could consult Baring by telegraph.” To this
Gladstone consented, and the telegram, which appears in the Blue Books,
was dispatched to Cromer, 1st December: “If General Charles Gordon were
willing to go to Egypt would he be of any use to you or to the Egyptian
Government, and if so in what capacity?” Cromer, however, without
ceremony refused the offer. He explains in “Modern Egypt” that his real
reason for refusing was that he knew Gordon to be an entirely unfit
person for the task, and that the reason he gave at the time of the
Egyptian Government’s being unwilling to send a Christian to Khartoum,
in view of the religious feeling there, was not the true one; and he
proceeds to give his reasons, founded on his knowledge of Gordon’s
character, for his belief in the unfitness, though he says nothing of
their personal quarrel in 1878, or of the ill-relations in past years
between Gordon and Tewfik.
It is certain all the same that Gordon’s status as a Christian was a
perfectly sound reason with Sherif for refusing his appointment, as
Gordon himself discovered when it was too late, three months afterwards.
And I cannot help suspecting that the whole plea of personal
“unfitness,” put forward in “Modern Egypt,” has been an afterthought on
Cromer’s part, devised to screen his own share in Gordon’s mission and
its failure. That Cromer and Gordon were personally antipathetic we
know. But, except as a Christian, it is nonsense to talk of Gordon as an
“unfit” person for such a duty as was then proposed. It had not at that
time been as yet decided that Khartoum was to be evacuated, and no
Englishman could have possibly been more fit than Gordon to hold it, if
that was possible, against the Mahdi, and restore the Khedive’s lost
authority. What Gordon was really unfit for, was to be the obedient
agent of a shifty and treacherous diplomacy, nominally a servant of
Egypt, but ready to execute any order of the British Agency at Cairo,
and to defend or betray his Egyptian employers at English bidding.
Cromer’s idea of loyalty and fitness for service in Egypt was always
that of loyalty to himself. Gordon’s was a quite different idea. He held
that an Englishman, accepting employment and receiving pay from a
foreign prince, was bound in honour to do the best he could, not for his
own country’s diplomatic interests, but for the advantage of the prince
and people he served. If Cromer had told us the whole of his thought in
“Modern Egypt,” we should have found it to be this, and that it was in
this sense only, and of his own personal dislike that his objection to
Gordon on the ground of “unfitness” must be understood.
Still less is there any truth in what he goes on to say that at this
time, December 1883, his hand was forced about Gordon by the London
press, and especially the “Pall Mall Gazette”; for such is the reverse
of fact and easily disproved. Any one who will take the trouble of
looking through the files of the chief London newspapers of that date
will find hardly any mention in them at all of Gordon. Indeed, the press
seems to have been quite ignorant of the proposal made regarding him.
During the whole of that year, 1883, Gordon had been all but ignored by
the English public; and, with the exception of two “headed articles” in
the “Times,” written early in the year while Dufferin was still
considering the appointment of Hicks, and one or two references to
Gordon in the “St. James’s Gazette,” I can find absolutely nothing about
him. As to the “Pall Mall,” that paper was on all matters where Egypt
was concerned run strictly on Gladstonian lines, advocating the
evacuation of the country at the earliest possible date, and with regard
to the Soudan complete abstention. All the earlier part of the year
Morley had been still its editor; and he, having experienced a revulsion
of feeling in regard to the attitude his paper had taken in bringing
about the war of 1882, was now in a mood of anti-Imperialist repentance,
nor had the “Pall Mall” changed its tone when Morley, having entered
Parliament, left his desk in Northumberland Street at the end of August.
William Stead, the new editor, who four months later was to run Gordon
for the Soudan, and be the chief advocate of accepting responsibility in
Egypt, was still in October reproving the Tory press for this very
advocacy, and indignant with the “Times” for its protest against the
withdrawal of the troops. As to Gordon, the only mention of him is one
rather of depreciation, written at the time of the first news of Hicks’
defeat, and the article might have emanated from the pen of Lord Cromer
himself; “Sir Samuel Baker,” says Stead in a leading article, 20th
November, on the disaster in Kordofan, “fought and conquered in the same
region, and it was also the scene of the labours of Colonel Gordon, but
although we should have lamented the fate of either of these daring
adventurers, no one dreamed that their defeat and death would have
entailed any responsibility upon the English Government. The fact that
since Gordon’s resignation we have occupied the Delta makes no
difference in our relation to the officers in command of the Egyptian
forces in the Soudan. Whether Hicks falls, or whether he conquers is not
our business. _Not a single British soldier will be ordered to Khartoum
if the Mahdi were to rout the whole force under the orders of the
Khedive’s officers_. . . . The question arises whether Sir E. Baring
ought not to tell the Egyptian Government that this kind of folly has
gone on long enough, and that there would be no chance of the re-
establishment of its prestige, credit, and independence, until its
ambition in the Soudan is restricted within a manageable compass.”
This article, be it noted, was published just a week before Granville’s
proposal to send Gordon, and, while it stands in strange contrast with
Stead’s pronouncements of two and three months later, it contradicts
absolutely Lord Cromer’s excuse that the sending of Gordon was forced on
the Government by Stead. It is a mere juggling with the issue to shift
the date of the pressure exercised by the press in January and February,
1884, back to November and December 1883. I will return to this matter
of the “Pall Mall” and the London press later. What is of more
historical importance is to show, as can easily be done by a reference
to the Blue Books and to his own avowals, that Cromer, in spite of his
attempt to shift the responsibility of the Gordon mission from his own
on to the back of the London public, was himself, in all but the
individual choice of Gordon as its instrument, the responsible proposer
of the mission. The facts are these:
Lord Cromer tells us that his first anxiety about Hicks and the Soudan
was in consequence of a talk with Giegler Pasha on 19th November, the
day before the article last quoted. Giegler seems to have infected
Cromer with something of the panic at that time beginning to prevail at
Khartoum; and, taking as he did a purely financial view of the
situation, he straightway telegraphed to Granville that, if Hicks should
be beaten, “the wisest course for the Egyptian Government to adopt would
be to accept defeat and fall back on whatever point of the Nile they
could hold with confidence.” There is nothing, however, to show that at
that time he meant more by this advice than to repeat Dufferin’s
recommendation of a withdrawal from the southern and western provinces,
and a concentration on Khartoum and Suakin. Indeed I think it is pretty
clear that it was so understood at the Foreign Office when Granville the
next day replied, “If consulted, recommend the abandonment of the Soudan
_within certain limits_.” It was then that the idea of Gordon’s being
sent was suggested; and certainly if an Englishman was to go in order to
carry out the abandonment Gordon was the obvious man. There was, indeed,
nobody else to do it with anything like as good a chance of success. The
only English officer then at Khartoum was Colonel Coetlogon, an
acknowledged incapable, who had telegraphed that Khartoum could not hold
out two months against the Mahdi, while Gordon, though not dispatched
till January, and though ultimately unsuccessful, managed by his great
energy and military genius to keep the Egyptian flag flying at Khartoum
for nearly twelve months after Coetlogon’s date. Yet Cromer in his
“Modern Egypt” says he judged Gordon for this purpose, “an unfit
person.” The next stage in the affair is that, the panic at Khartoum
still continuing, Cromer on the 3rd December writes a long dispatch,
still under the influence of the panic, recommending a withdrawal of the
Egyptian garrisons, not only to Khartoum or Berber, but even as far as
to Wady Halfa, thus abandoning the Soudan in its entirety. It was
probably Coetlogon’s continued telegrams that suggested it, and the
unwillingness of the English Government to give any material assistance.
And to this proposal Granville, on 13th December, at once assents,
explaining that all the English Government is prepared to do is to
“assist in maintaining order in Egypt proper, and in defending it as
well as the ports in the Red Sea.”
By the 22nd December, however, we find Cromer in a different mood. He
had found the Egyptian Government unable to “agree to the abandonment of
the territories which they consider absolutely necessary for the
security and even for the existence itself” of Egypt, and they were for
invoking the aid of the Sultan and of Turkish troops. Moreover, the
reports from Khartoum had begun to be less alarming; the Mahdi had not
advanced to attack the place, and was lingering on at El Obeyd. Although
Cromer does not say so precisely in his despatch of that date (22nd
December), it is easy to read between the lines of it that the idea had
occurred to him that, while insisting upon the abandonment of the whole
Soudan by Egypt, it might be possible not to surrender it to the Mahdi,
but to build up some other form of native self-government, under English
direction at Khartoum, which should constitute a semi-civilized buffer
state between Egypt and the Mahdi’s fanatical rule. The idea of this is
to be found in the last sentences of his despatch, where, after
recounting the difficulties attendant on the proposed withdrawal and the
objections raised by Sherif Pasha, he goes on, in contradiction of his
first alarmist dispatches: “The immediate position is not, I think, so
alarming as appears to be thought in England. Dissensions seem to be
rife among the tribes of the Soudan, some of the most important being
opposed to the Mahdi. It is quite possible that by a judicious
expenditure of money and by good management the Government of the
Khedive may succeed in maintaining its authority northwards from
Khartoum. They will not, however, be able to hold that country except on
sufferance, and I believe them to be perfectly incapable of governing it
properly.” Therefore they must be coerced into abandoning it, and he
asks for power to coerce them. “The only way,” he says, “in which it can
be carried out, will be for me to inform the Khedive that Her Majesty’s
Government insist on the adoption of this course, and that if his
present Ministers will not carry out the policy others must be named who
will consent to do so.” Then he adds, disclosing here his thought: “_It
would also be necessary to send an English officer of high authority to
Khartoum with full power to withdraw the garrisons and to make the best
arrangements possible for the future government of that country_.”
I recommend this dispatch to the renewed attention of historians, for in
it lies not only the demand for new absolute powers to be undertaken by
England in Egypt, but also in regard to the Soudan, the germ of that
claim, afterwards enforced upon the Khedive in 1899, that Egypt should
abandon the Soudan, leaving it to England to decide what later should be
its status. The Egyptian Government was to withdraw its troops, but “an
English officer of high authority” was to be sent to Khartoum, not only
to insist upon the withdrawal, but also to provide the Soudan with a new
government. One cannot help thinking that Cromer may have already
contemplated what he afterwards carried out, the appropriation of the
great Nile provinces to England herself.
At any rate it is quite certain that we see in this dispatch of 22nd
December clearly set forth what was to be the Gordon mission, though
Gordon himself is not named in it. An English officer was to go to
Khartoum not only to bring away the garrison, as was afterwards
pretended, but to re-establish order and set up a new political regime.
It is characteristic of Cromer’s lack of scruple as a historian that, in
order to evade admitting his initial responsibility for the mission and
for its failure, he should have omitted, in quoting the concluding
sentence of this dispatch in “Modern Egypt,” the essential word
“English,” and should have altered it into “an officer of high
authority,” thereby enabling him to make it appear that it was not
Gordon or any Englishman, but an Egyptian officer he had in his mind
when writing it. The omission can hardly have been an accident in a
passage so important. Yet none of his critics so far have noticed the
manœuvre.[21]
This brings us to the end of the year 1883, and almost to the date, 7th
January 1884, of Gordon’s arrival from Palestine in England; and again I
beg the attention of historians to what I am now going to say.
The particular choice of Gordon for the mission Cromer had proposed,
though as we have seen his name had been more than once talked of at the
Foreign Office, would probably never have been actually made and
insisted on but for a combination of chances closely connected with a
Cabinet intrigue just then coming to a head in London. Down to the end
of the year 1883 nobody was thinking at all of Gordon in connection with
actual circumstances in the Soudan, nor was anything known of Cromer’s
proposal. Gordon had been away close on a year in Palestine, and had
kept silence, an unusual thing with him, during the whole of it as far
as the press was concerned. Not a dozen persons in England knew of his
being on his way back to Europe, and his few friends at head-quarters
looked upon him as being engaged to King Leopold for service on the
Congo, and so out of the question for Khartoum—this although they knew
also that the idea of the Soudan was once more present to his mind,
since the defeat of Hicks, as a possibility and a temptation for his
ambition. He had written to Wolseley to get him leave at the War Office
to enter Leopold’s service, and on landing at Genoa had gone straight to
Brussels, there to arrange terms with the King about the Congo. Except
for a few reviews of Hake’s book “Chinese Gordon,” which had been
published at Christmas time, I can find nothing about him in any of the
London newspapers. And so things stood at the end of the year.
It would be a curious matter to speculate what might have been the
respective fates of the Nile population and those of the Congo if
Gordon’s contract, then all but signed, with Leopold had been carried
into effect. It would probably have been for the welfare, or, let us
say, the lesser suffering of both. It is difficult to think of the Congo
venture taking the inhuman shape it did had Gordon ever had personally
to do with it, and had he been left alive to protest against a violation
of human rights so monstrous; while, on the other hand, the Egyptian
Soudan might have been spared the destruction of four-fifths of its
inhabitants at the blundering hands of our Government, and its present
melancholy subjection to European rule. Chance, however, or whatever
directs the destinies for good and evil in the world, ruled it
otherwise, and Gordon, turned aside from the Congo, was to meet his
fate, not there, but upon the Upper Nile, while the Congo was to become
the scene of still greater horrors. Whose the hands were exactly that
pulled the strings in the affair and sent him to his doom, and what was
the relative amount of responsibility assignable to each of the chief
actors, with the mystery of their secret motives, I have been at great
pains to ascertain. This is how the thing, when carefully examined,
appears to have come about.
Gordon’s return to Europe, as I have said, coincided very exactly with a
crisis both in London and at Cairo closely connected with the mission he
was a few days later to be entrusted with. Gladstone’s Cabinet had, at
Cromer’s suggestion, agreed that the Khedive’s Government should be
advised to evacuate the whole Soudan as far north as Wady Halfa, and the
Khedive and Sherif Pasha, his Prime Minister, had refused, and Cromer
had asked permission to add threats to advice, and to insist upon the
advice being taken. The request involved an entire change in Gladstone’s
Egyptian policy, which had, so far, been to assume a minimum of
governing responsibility in Egypt proper, and none at all in the Soudan.
On this point, however, he no longer could count upon a clear majority
in his Cabinet, and parties within it were so evenly balanced that, as
is usual in such cases, the London press was being called in to add
weight to opinion on either side.
Moreover, the press being largely in the hands of capitalists and City
financiers, it was happening, as is also usual in such cases, that the
balance of journalistic opinion, directly it came to understand the
position in the Cabinet, was as largely on the side where money
interests were involved. These lay strongly with the continuation of the
British occupation of Egypt, and with the undertaking by England, where
the chance should be given, of new responsibilities. The house of
Rothschild still held half the Domains Loan of £9,000,000 in its own
hands, and the “Times” was its obedient organ. It needed therefore only
a slight impulse from the War Office, which was the head-quarters of the
faction opposed to Gladstone, to set the press in motion on the Soudan
question; and on the first day of the year 1884, we find the “Times”
publishing a strong letter from Sir Samuel Baker protesting against the
abandonment of the Soudan by civilization, and urging the employment of
British or Indian troops for the purpose of recovering it from the
Mahdi. It was a powerful letter, and we find it supported by a leading
article, as strongly recommending the assumption of full authority by
England at Cairo and citing with regard to the Soudan the Dufferin
recommendation of the year before, namely that, while Darfour and
Kordofan might be abandoned, Khartoum and the northern and eastern
provinces should be retained, that troops should be sent to Assouan, and
that communication with the Red Sea should be reopened by the
construction of a railway from Berber to Souakin. This was not only the
Dufferin but also the Gordon policy, as was well known both to Samuel
Baker and to those who inspired the “Times.” Baker was interested in the
Soudan both by his former connection with it and by the fact that his
brother Valentine (Baker Pasha) had just been ordered to Souakin to
defend the Red Sea coast against Osman Digna the new Mahdist leader. In
Baker’s letter to the “Times” occurs the first public suggestion I can
find of Gordon’s being employed by the Government to solve the
difficulty at Khartoum. It is not repeated in the “Times” article, nor
is it more than a question “Why should not General Gordon Pasha be
invited to assist the Government?”
Two days later, a Cabinet meeting being about to be held where the fate
of the new policy of Egypt was to be decided, we find the “Pall Mall
Gazette” yielding to the same influence and announcing its sudden
conversion from the evacuationist Gladstonian view of Egyptian policy,
of which it had been so stout and consistent a supporter, to that of
Gladstone’s political opponents in the Cabinet. It opened its campaign
by publishing the first of a series of leading articles on the crisis,
issued on consecutive days and headed respectively, “Facing a Crisis,”
“The Alternatives,” “Downing Street and Cairo,” and “The Drift of Events
in Egypt.” All were sensational articles, and all in favour of the full
authority in Egypt Cromer was demanding, namely, that of enabling him to
coerce the Khedive, take the supreme power at Cairo into his own hands
and assume sole responsibility in regard to the Soudan.
No one, I think, with any knowledge of journalism can doubt that a
conversion so sudden and so violent can have been due to anything less
than a Ministerial hint of the very directest kind. The decision of the
Cabinet to undertake the new responsibility at Cairo was come to on the
3rd January, the date of the first “Pall Mall Gazette” article, but it
was not known to the general public till the 7th, the date of the fourth
article, and so must have been the result of private information from
within the Cabinet, probably from the War Office and communicated by
Brett, who was Hartington’s private secretary and his usual intermediary
with the press, besides being an old member of the “Pall Mall”
staff.[22] There is, however, as yet no mention in any of the “Pall Mall
Gazette” articles of Gordon, nor can I find his name in any London paper
except in the one phrase I have quoted from the “Times,” during that
first week of the year, the reason doubtless being that Gordon’s few
friends knew that on landing at Genoa he had gone straight to Brussels,
_en route_ for the Congo. The only allusion to Gordon in the “Pall Mall
Gazette” of that week is not in the articles, but in an “occasional
note,” and again in the form of a query, “Chinese Gordon is to undertake
the administration of the Congo. . . . Is it not a pity that at a time
when so much other work is urgently wanting to be done in Egypt and
elsewhere the ablest leader of irregular forces England has produced
should be told off to the service of an International Association amid
the swamps of the Congo?”
This was all that had been said about Gordon before his arrival at
Southampton on the 7th. He had spent the best part of the week at
Brussels before proceeding to England, and had found there on 2nd
January a communication awaiting him from Wolseley, with whom he had
been in correspondence, telling him that the permission he had asked for
at the War Office to take service under King Leopold was refused him by
the British Government. This had brought him in haste to England, and he
had arrived at his sister’s house at Southampton so angry about the
refusal that his first act had been to sign and send in his papers to
the War Office resigning his commission in Her Majesty’s army. His
brother Sir Henry tells us that the refusal was “more a Foreign Office
than a War Office question, and the refusal emanated from the former.”
Gordon took it to be due to a Foreign Office prepossession against him.
It is possible, however, to read the refusal in another sense, and that
Granville, who had already once proposed him to Cromer, and who was
considering Cromer’s demand for an English officer, still wished to
retain a hold over Gordon for the contingency of his being required at
Khartoum; and this is how I am inclined to interpret it. It is difficult
indeed to understand it otherwise, seeing that the Foreign Office must
have just then received Cromer’s telegram asking for an officer to carry
out a duty precisely such as Gordon was most fitted, indeed the only man
fitted, to perform.
For these reasons, too, I refuse to accept as entirely reliable Mr.
Stead’s claim to absolute independence of official inspiration in the
matter of his celebrated interview with Gordon at Southampton, which
took place on the day following the general’s arrival there. Mr. Stead’s
genius may very well have conceived the idea of the visit as the
particular form in which Gordon was to be advertised; but in view of the
series of articles just alluded to, and knowing as I do the ways of
journalism and the close connection there was that year between the
“Pall Mall Gazette” and the War Office through Lord Esher, and having,
moreover, been myself more than once interviewed by Mr. Stead, I find it
impossible not to recognize in the sudden entrance of Gordon into the
intrigue one of those manœuvres worked from time to time in the “Pall
Mall” columns through Lord Esher’s agency.
We know from Fitzmaurice’s “Life of Granville” that the antagonism
between Hartington and Gladstone did actually exist at the time, and
that it had just then reached a critical stage; and we know that
Hartington, as Secretary for War, must have been the Minister to whom
the choice of an officer for Khartoum had been referred, and who, in
fact, did a few days later decide it, and we know Lord Esher’s position
at the War Office, and we know his connection with the “Pall Mall
Gazette.” Lord Esher was Gordon’s friend, Mr. Stead at the time was not.
Lord Esher was conversant with his movements, with his application for
leave to serve King Leopold, with the refusal of his leave, and I
decline to believe that there was no hint given on which Mr. Stead
acted. In every newspaper office there are scores of such journalistic
secrets never divulged and easily forgotten, and it seems to me vastly
more probable that the Gordon “boom” was one of them.
What is quite certain is that, from the moment of the publication of the
interview, the “Pall Mall” became avowedly the organ of that section of
the Cabinet which was working for intervention in the Soudan, if
necessary, by force of arms. If any one doubts this he needs to go no
further than to the files of the “Pall Mall” for proof. There is among
the rest a perfectly plain confession of the fact in a leading article
of 14th February, where Stead thus excuses himself as the Liberal editor
of a Liberal journal for his advocacy of the Gordon mission at a time
when many Liberals were far from approving it. “From a mere party point
of view,” Stead writes, “it is often the most useful thing a true
Liberal can do to oppose the immediate policy of his party, for it is
only by that means that he can secure the adoption of the policy which
will give victory to his own side. _Cabinets, it must never be
forgotten, are composite bodies, and the outsider who advocates a new
departure is often the exponent of the views of those who in the secrecy
of the council chamber have been hitherto unsuccessfully striving for
the policy_ that makes for righteousness and peace. There are times when
the most loyal followers may find it necessary to indicate to his
leaders the path of safety which they may hitherto have been too
preoccupied to perceive or too evenly divided to adopt.” The whole
passage, and especially those words which I have italicized, is a very
candid avowal of the position of things as between the “Pall Mall
Gazette” and the section of the Cabinet represented by Hartington, and
it was explained to me in this way on my return to England by those in a
position to know.
With regard to the interview itself, perhaps the most important part of
it in this regard are the phrases used in the leading article
recommending the interview. It is a repetition and amplification of the
question put by Sir Samuel Baker in his “Times” letter of a week before.
“Why not,” asks Stead, “send Chinese Gordon with full powers to Khartoum
to assume absolute control of the territory, to relieve the garrisons,
and do what can be done to save what can be saved from the wreck in the
Soudan? . . . No one can deny the urgent need in the midst of that
hideous welter of confusion for the presence of such a man with a born
genius for command and unexampled capacity for organizing ever-
victorious armies and a perfect knowledge of the Soudan and its people.
Why not send him out with _carte blanche_ to do the best that can be
done?”
Here we have the Gordon mission exactly as it was sent, in fact if not
nominally, by Her Majesty’s ministers nine days later, almost exactly as
it had been proposed by Cromer in December, namely, the sending of “an
English officer of high authority to Khartoum with full power to
withdraw the garrisons and to make the best arrangements possible for
the future government of that country.” Seeing that nothing as yet was
known outside the public offices of Cromer’s dispatch or of his having
made any such demand, and the extreme improbability of an identity of
ideas between Stead and Cromer by mere journalistic inspiration, I think
we may fairly conclude that the description by Stead of what Gordon was
to effect at Khartoum was due to a War Office suggestion rather than
mere accident. At any rate, it is absurd that Cromer, of all persons,
should complain as he does in his “Modern Egypt” of the idea of the
mission having been forced upon him by the “Pall Mall Gazette.” All that
can fairly be said is that Stead, having got an inkling that such a
mission had been demanded, put the dots promptly and powerfully on the
_i_’s and named the only man capable of carrying it out effectually. It
is difficult indeed to understand, notwithstanding all we know of
Cromer’s dislike of Gordon and his recent protestations, that Gordon was
absent from his mind when he penned his telegram of 22nd December. Lord
Cromer has a convenient way of forgetting things when it suits him to
forget, and it has probably suited him to forget this among the rest. At
any rate, it is impossible to suggest another name.
Neither, I think, can it be pretended that Stead’s recommendation of
Gordon for the post was so potent and instantaneous an influence at the
Foreign Office as to have forced Granville’s hand unless Granville had
been already willing. Between the publication of the “Pall Mall”
interview and Lord Granville’s second proposal to Cromer of sending
Gordon there was an interval of less than twenty-four hours, and it is
far more likely that those in the Cabinet who wanted to send Gordon
should have made use of Stead to popularize their plan than that Stead
should have been able by his few words, however powerful, so suddenly to
force it on them. Gordon’s views, publicly and forcibly stated in the
“Pall Mall Gazette,” may possibly have quickened the pace, and this is
all that can reasonably be affirmed about it. The real object of the
press campaign of the past week, it is essential to understand, had been
to force not Granville’s hand, but Gladstone’s. Granville needed no
convincing. He was already of the Hartington faction in regard to Egypt.
But Gladstone, it was known, would be difficult to persuade. Gladstone,
unlike the rest, really wanted to get out of Egypt, he really wanted to
have nothing to do with the Soudan, and he had only consented to the new
responsibility undertaken at Cairo a fortnight before of making and
unmaking ministries on its being explained to him that thus alone could
he escape being involved in the further responsibility of Khartoum. It
was necessary now to force his hand to the idea of sending up an
“English officer of high authority” not only to withdraw the garrisons,
but also to stay on at Khartoum and to “arrange a future government.”
Gladstone could hardly be made to swallow this second dose of
responsibility, except through pressure from outside the Cabinet, the
pressure of public opinion, and this it was that was put upon him by
Hartington through Stead and the magic of Gordon’s name. The “Pall Mall
Gazette” had more than once been used to coerce Gladstone. It was the
paper that he chiefly read.[23]
Granville’s position was quite different. It was an intermediate one
between Gladstone’s and Hartington’s. A Whig by birth and tradition and,
as Foreign Secretary in 1881-82, the member of the Cabinet most directly
concerned in the aggression on Egypt, he needed no conversion at all to
the idea of remaining on at Cairo or of a further commitment to
responsibility in the Soudan, and he was certainly at one with
Hartington on these points; but, on the other hand, Gladstone was his
chief, with whom he could not afford to quarrel. He was poor and in
debt, and dependent on Gladstone for his continuance in office. What
made him of value in the Cabinet was his amiability. He was friends with
both factions,[24] and was used by them both as go-between. In the
present instance it was necessary to get Gladstone to go with Hartington
the way the Whigs wanted. They had used the press, and precisely the
“Pall Mall Gazette” under Morley, against him in the spring of 1882 when
they wanted his consent for the sending of the fleet to bombard
Alexandria. They were using the same “Pall Mall Gazette” under Stead now
that they wanted his consent to the sending of an “English officer” to
Sarawak the Soudan. They had pretended to Gladstone in 1882 that the
mission of the fleet would be one of moral pressure only, to protect
British subjects, and give moral support to the Khedive—no actual firing
of guns, nothing at all like an armed intervention in Egypt, still less
like a permanent occupation. They pretended to him now that Gordon’s
mission was to be an entirely peaceful one, a tour of inspection, to
withdraw the garrisons by peaceable means and return at once in a few
weeks. Of course it was nothing really of the sort; it could not really
be anything of the sort, and they knew it; it was to arrange a new
government at Khartoum, and this could only be done by reorganizing a
fighting force under Englishmen, and thus indirectly by an English
occupation of Egypt indefinitely prolonged.
Any one who will take the trouble to go through all the documents of the
case with an open mind will, I think, inevitably agree with this reading
of the facts. It is the only one that accounts rationally for
Gladstone’s position afterwards or for that of any one of those
principally concerned. Morley, in his “Life of Gladstone,” would have
one believe that Granville and Hartington, and Dilke and Northbrook,
four level-headed English politicians, at least as much rogues
politically as fools, went suddenly mad on Stead’s persuading them that
Gordon was a miracle man. Cabinet Ministers, however, do not go mad in
this way; their madnesses have much more method than that. Nor are they
thus carried off their legs in twenty-four hours by a newspaper
interview. It is they that inspire the newspapers, not the newspapers
them; and, though Heaven knows they are guided at times by little enough
wisdom, it is seldom to the press they go for their folly, especially at
the Foreign Office. For the rest of the situation it is necessary to
consider that Granville does not seem to have understood all when on the
9th, the evening of the day after Stead’s interview was published, he
telegraphed to Cromer, “Would General Charles Gordon or Sir Charles
Wilson be of assistance under altered circumstances in Egypt?”—the
“altered circumstances” being of course Cromer’s assumption of all
power. Stead’s _ballon d’essai_ had been well received in London by the
morning papers, and Granville doubtless felt surer of his ground with
Gladstone. The circumstances, however, had not been favourable to either
Gordon or Wilson. Nubar hated Gordon, and the Khedive hated Wilson, who
had baulked him in his intention of hanging Arabi;[25] and Cromer, who
only wanted now an obedient agent at the end of a wire, and who knew
Gordon was not the man implicitly to obey any of them, willingly joined
Nubar and the Khedive in their refusal. Once more, therefore, Gordon was
found to be “quite unfit,” and Cromer’s reply, 12th January, was, “I
have consulted Nubar Pasha and I do not think that the services of
General Gordon or Sir Charles Wilson can be utilized at present.”
Cromer in his “Modern Egypt” says that the man they had in view then was
after all no Englishman, but an Egyptian, Abd-el-Kader Pasha, an
excellent man doubtless for a job in the Soudan, but he does not explain
Nubar’s objection to Gordon, and in order to avoid the difficulty of
doing so, and of reconciling his refusal of either Englishman now
offered him with his special request a few weeks before for an English
officer, he drops, as we have seen, the word “English” out of his
earlier telegram. The attempt to get Abd-el-Kader to undertake their
work occupied another several more days in the final decision, and it
was not till Gladstone’s and Cromer’s and Nubar’s consent had all been
obtained, by the 16th, that the actual sending on the 18th was carried
into effect. How this was engineered in London, and on what conditions,
we will now examine, following Gordon’s steps from day to day in
accordance with his recorded movements.
Stead’s interview with Gordon took place at Southampton on the 8th
January, and was published on the afternoon of the 9th. It reached
Gordon at Southampton on the morning of the 10th, and had on him a very
disturbing influence. In the interview itself he had been careful not to
suggest that he was himself willing to undertake the task proposed to
him; on the contrary, he had suggested Sir Samuel Baker as the proper
man for it. He looked upon the Soudan as a temptation to vain glory, and
Stead’s suddenly thrusting him forward into the glare of publicity as a
candidate for the duty troubled his conscience. In his heart he was
tempted to go, if only the Government would send him, yet it was what he
called his “Agag,” the thing he must “hew in pieces,” his besetting sin
of “hailing the tram of the world.” It was in this double mood that he
fled the same evening to the vicarage of his religious friend, Dr.
Barnes, at Heavitree, near Exeter, there to take spiritual counsel, and
also to see Baker, who lived in the neighbourhood, and consult with him
as to what was to be done. Barnes’ story of this visit is brief, but
enlightening and most characteristic of the man Gordon was. The worthy
vicar thus records it:
“He [Gordon] found time to spend a night at Heavitree Vicarage, and on
the morning of Friday the 11th of January, he received Holy Communion in
the parish church. This, so far as I can trace his course, was, with one
exception, his last communion. On the same morning he visited Bishop
Temple, with whom, as we have seen from a letter already quoted, he had
wished to ‘talk about those things’—the only things which seemed to him
to be of really vital interest and importance.
“Later in the day he went on to Sandford Orleigh, Sir Samuel Baker’s
house; and to those who accompanied him it was pleasant to see the
meeting between the two ex-governors of the Soudan. While we were
driving from Newton Abbot Station to Sandford Orleigh, Sir Samuel Baker
pressed on Gordon the expediency of his again going to the Soudan as
Governor-General, if Her Majesty’s Government should require it. Gordon
was silent, but his eyes flashed, and an eager expression passed over
his face as he looked at his host. Late at night, when we had retired,
he came to my room, and said in a soft voice, ‘You saw me to-day?’ ‘You
mean in the carriage?’ ‘Yes; you saw _me_—that was _myself_—the self I
want to get rid of.’”
The same evening he wrote a letter to Baker—it was probably agreed
between them that he should do so—in which he again urged Baker to
accept the task, and gave him his idea of what would be necessary for
successfully carrying it out. This letter Baker sent to the “Times,” and
it appeared in that paper on the morning of the 14th. We will return to
what he said in it later, when we consider precisely what those who sent
him on his mission intended him to do. It had the effect of causing
Granville to write that same day privately (note the humanitarian
appeal) to Gladstone: “If Gordon says he believes he could by his
personal influence excite the tribes to escort the Khartoum garrison and
inhabitants to Suakin, a little pressure on Baring might be advisable.
The destruction of these poor people would be a great disaster.” Also on
the morning of the 15th, Gladstone’s consent having been obtained,
Wolseley, who had already sent for Gordon, was commissioned to sound him
as to his willingness to go, and found him to be so under certain
conditions.
What these were, and what exactly passed between the two on the 15th, it
is very difficult to disentangle from the conflicting evidence, for
little of it was put in writing at the time, and the chief testimony
regarding it rests upon the recollections of persons, or rather of
partisans, all concerned in excusing themselves many years after the
event. Thus Lord Esher (Brett) tells us that on that occasion, besides
Wolseley, Gordon saw Hartington and Granville, but I think there must be
some confusion of memory here in which the interview of the 15th has
been mixed up with that of three days later, the 18th. Esher’s words
are: “In January 1884, after his interviews with Lord Hartington and
Lord Granville, Gordon came for the last time to Tilney Street. He was
leaving for Brussels. I can see him now with his muffler and his warm
coat walking about the nursery with my eldest son in his arms.” Now
Gordon, in a letter from Brussels dated the 17th, says: “Brocklehurst is
here with me. Government and authorities have been exceedingly kind and
I have every reason to be grateful to them for I have often worried them
and they have decided to let me stay on in H. M. S. (Service?).” This,
as Brett was certainly in the best position to know, would seem
conclusive as to the date, for Gordon left for Brussels the next
morning, the 16th, but I feel sure that the visit described at Tilney
Street was on the 18th, when Gordon certainly saw both Hartington and
Granville. About the 15th, writing soon after the event, Sir Henry
Gordon says very clearly, “on the 15th January General Gordon came up to
London in accordance with a telegram from Lord Wolseley and had an
interview with him of over two hours, during which time although Lord
Wolseley saw some members of the Cabinet General Gordon did not.” And
Sir Henry goes on to say that his brother that same evening came to dine
with him, and next morning went with Brocklehurst to Brussels. As to
what took place between Wolseley and Gordon, nothing very precisely is
known, as Gordon seems to have kept his own counsel about it.
Fitzmaurice says briefly: “Lord Wolseley met General Gordon, then on his
way to Brussels, and discussed the situation in Egypt with him. Having
asked the General what under the circumstances of the hour he would do,
Lord Wolseley received the reply ‘I would send myself.’ The brief
conversation suggested that General Gordon, stirred by the thought of
the threatened collapse of the edifice which he had helped to raise,
through the very dangers he had foreseen, and believing that he alone
was the man of the situation, was prepared to cancel his existing
engagements and return to the Soudan.”
The text of Granville’s telegram of the same evening to Cromer, using
the gentle pressure which Gladstone had agreed to, is given in “Modern
Egypt,” dispatched, doubtless, on Wolseley’s report of the conversation.
“I hear indirectly that Gordon is ready to go straight to Suakin without
passing through Cairo on the following rather vague terms, his mission
to be to report to Her Majesty’s Government on the military situation in
the Soudan and to return without any further engagement towards him. He
would be under you for instructions and will send letters through you
under flying seal. You and Nubar Pasha to give him all assistance and
facilities as to telegraphing, etc. Egyptian Government to send Ibrahim
Fowzi to meet him at Suez with a writer to attend on him. He might be of
use in informing you and us of the situation. It would be popular at
home but there may be countervailing objections. Tell me your real
opinion with or without Nubar Pasha.” The word “indirectly” would seem
to mean that Granville had not himself seen Gordon that day. The phrase
about the mission being to “report” only seems to have been the gentle
way of putting things calculated to gain Cromer’s acquiescence, and it
is on this initial account of the mission communicated also to
Gladstone, with the design to allay his suspicions as well, that the
legend was based to which Gladstone always adhered, that Gordon had
received no other instructions, and had disobeyed them by understanding
that they covered wider ground. It is quite impossible, however, that
this should have been all that passed between Wolseley and Gordon during
the two hours their conference had lasted, or that it was in this sense
that Gordon understood the proposal made to him by the War Office.
Gordon’s letter to Baker had been published the morning of the day
before in the “Times,” and it was very explicit about what ought to be
done in the Soudan, and the minimum of outside support needed to
accomplish it successfully.
Cromer, in his “Modern Egypt,” makes light of the interview with Stead
at Southampton as being only talk, but he cannot say the same of the
published letter which, according to his usual controversial practice,
he passes by in silence. Gordon in the interview had declared in the
plainest possible words not only that Khartoum ought to and must be held
against the Mahdi, but that the evacuation of its garrison, with the
garrisons of Darfur and the Upper Nile, was a physical impossibility; he
lays this down in language as to which there can be no conceivable
mistake: “Whatever you decide about evacuation you cannot evacuate
because your army cannot be moved; you must either surrender absolutely
to the Mahdi or defend Khartoum at all hazards, the latter is the only
course which ought to be entertained. There is no serious difficulty
about it, the Mahdi’s forces will fall to pieces of themselves, but if
in a moment of panic orders are issued for the abandonment of the whole
of the Eastern Soudan, a blow will be struck against Egypt and the peace
of the East which may have fatal consequences. . . . Nubar should be
left untrammelled by any stipulations concerning the evacuation of
Khartoum; there is no hurry. The garrisons can hold their own at
present, let them continue to hold on until disunion and tribal
jealousies have worked their natural result in the camp of the Mahdi.
Nubar should be free to deal with the Soudan in his own way. How he will
deal with the Soudan I cannot profess to say, but I should imagine that
he would appoint a Governor-General at Khartoum with full powers, and
furnish him with 2,000,000 sterling. . . . Sir Samuel Baker might be
appointed Governor-General, he might take his brother as Commander-in-
Chief.” This was a strong fighting policy, and, _mutatis mutandis_,
precisely how he afterwards understood his instructions. In his letter
to Baker he had been even more explicit. “To my mind,” he says,
“patience and diplomacy are far more needed than arms. Still to some
degree you must have the latter. . . . I would recommend (1) permission
to be got from the Sultan to engage 4,000 of his reserved troops, both
officers and men, which will be under your brother’s command, and be
volunteers with the promise of remuneration at the end of their service;
(2) that some 2,000 Belooches under the native officers should be
enlisted in India, who have been soldiers of Her Majesty, old sturdy
warriors; for your cavalry you can horse them in the Hedjaz, Palestine,
and Syria; (3) that Her Majesty’s Government will allow you to purchase
from Her Majesty animals, paying a percentage upon all purchases; (4)
that Her Majesty’s Government should allow military store officers to
aid you but not to go into the field”—another fighting programme.
With these two pronouncements of what was to be done hot before them—and
Hartington and Granville and Wolseley must all have read them—it is
ludicrous to suppose that the real object of the mission, as it was
certainly understood by Gordon, and afterwards, to the best of his
power, put in execution by him, was not discussed between Gordon and
Wolseley, or by Wolseley as go-between with Hartington and Granville, or
that these did not understand it in an active sense. Cromer scouts the
idea of Gordon having been sent to him only to report, and in this
Cromer is right. The talk of reporting was only make-believe, gently to
propitiate him, Cromer, and to propitiate Gladstone; it never had any
reality. Hartington, describing the mission some weeks later in the
House of Commons, while attempting to excuse the Government, admits that
the mission had a larger and more important scope than either reporting
or a withdrawal of the garrisons. “Gordon’s mission,” he says, 20th
February 1884, was “to attempt the rescue of 28,000 men contained in
Khartoum and the other portions of the Soudan, and not only these
garrisons, but also to make some arrangement for the better government
of those provinces.” He was clearly quoting Cromer’s original words of
the previous December, which had all along remained the basis of the
mission as understood by himself and his own section of the Cabinet at
the War Office.
If Gordon was not sent at once on the 15th to Khartoum it was because
Cromer had not yet answered Granville’s latest telegram. While waiting
for it he consequently went back to Brussels to excuse himself with King
Leopold for breaking his Congo agreement. The War Office had already
refused to accept his resignation of his commission, and on the 17th,
Cromer and Nubar having capitulated on the 16th declaring now that
Gordon was the best man, Gordon was telegraphed for and returned to
London.[26] Here on the 18th the same process of interviewing took place
at the War Office; first, a talk between Gordon and Wolseley; then, in
the afternoon, with four members of the Cabinet, who had been hastily
got together, all of them members of the Hartington faction and without
Gladstone, who was still away invalided at Hawarden. The discussion that
day seems to have been little more than formal, for Gordon was already
in his train by eight o’clock to catch the Brindisi mail for Egypt, and
the instructions had had to be drafted and written out and signed at the
Foreign Office, and a search made for Stewart, who was to go with him,
and good-byes to be said. Gordon was brought into a room where the four
Ministers, Hartington, Granville, Dilke, and Northbrook,[27] were, and
exchanged a few words with them, and that seems to have been all. The
whole of the details clearly had been arranged with Wolseley. Gordon’s
own account of the interview is given in a letter he wrote to Barnes in
the train, and posted at Brindisi on the 22nd.
“I saw Wolseley at 8 a.m. He said nothing was settled, but Ministers
would see me at 3.30 p.m. No one knew I had come back. At noon he,
Wolseley, came for me and took me to Ministers. He went in and talked to
the Ministers and came back and said: ‘Her Majesty’s Government want you
to understand this—Government are determined to evacuate Soudan, for
they will not guarantee future government. Will you go and do it?’ I
said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Go in.’ I went in and saw them. They said, ‘Did
Wolseley tell you our orders?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘You will not
guarantee future government of Soudan, and you wish me to go up and
evacuate now.’ I said ‘Yes,’ and it was over, and I left at 8 p.m. for
Calais. Very little passed between us. The Duke [of Cambridge] and
Wolseley came to see me off, so that is over.”