She too had the historical imagination, the love of research, and the
power of writing. Husband and wife produced in co-operation a small
geography of the British Isles, well planned, clear, and pleasant to
read. But, apart from this, she was content, during the too brief period
of their married life, to subordinate her activities to helping her
husband, and her aid was invaluable at the time when he was writing his
later books. There is no doubt that his marriage prolonged his life. The
care which his wife took of him, whether in their home in foggy London,
or in primitive lodgings in beautiful Capri, helped him over his worst
days; and the new value which he now set on life and its happiness gave
him redoubled force of will. There were others who helped him in these
days of perpetual struggle with ill-health. His doctors, Sir Andrew
Clark and Sir Lauder Brunton, rendered him the devotion of personal
friends. The historians gathered round him in Kensington Square, the
home of his later years, and cheered him with good talk. Those who were
lucky enough to be admitted might hear him at his best, discussing
historical questions in a circle which included Sir Henry Maine and
Bishop Stubbs, as well as Lecky, Freeman, and Bryce. He had many other
interests. Such a man could not be indifferent to contemporary politics.
His heroes--and he was an ardent worshipper of heroes--were Gladstone
and Garibaldi, and, like many Liberals of the day, he was violent in his
opposition to Beaconsfield's policy in Eastern Europe. Hatred of
Napoleonic tyranny killed for a while his sympathy with France, and in
1870 he sympathized with the German cause--at least till the rape of the
two provinces and the sorrows of disillusioned France revived his old
feeling for the French nation. Over everything he felt keenly and
expressed himself warmly. As Tennyson said to him at the close of a
visit to Aldworth, 'You're a jolly, vivid man; you're as vivid as
lightning'.
Particularly dear to him was the close sympathy of Stopford Brooke and
that of Humphry Ward, to whose father he had been curate in 1860 and who
had himself for years learnt to cherish the friendship of Green and to
seek his counsel. Mrs. Ward has told us how she (then Miss Arnold)
brought her earliest literary efforts to Green, how kindly was his
encouragement but how formidable was the standard of excellence which he
set up. She has also pictured for us 'the thin wasted form seated in the
corner of the sofa... the eloquent lips... the life flashing from his
eyes beneath the very shadow of death'. His latter years, lived
perpetually under this grim shadow, were yet full of cheerfulness and
of hope. However the body might fail, the active brain was planning and
the high courage was bracing him to further effort. Between 1877 and
1880 he published in four volumes a _History of the English People_,
which follows the same plan and covers much the same ground as the
_Short History_. He was able to revise his views on points where recent
study threw fresh light and to include subjects which had been crowded
out for want of space. But the book failed to attract readers to the
same extent as the _Short History_. The freshness and buoyancy of the
earlier sketch could not be recaptured after so long an interval. In the
last year of his life he began again on the early history of England,
working at a pace which would have been astonishing even in a man of
robust health, and he completed in the short period of eleven months the
brilliant volume called _The Making of England_. He had thought out the
subject during many a day and night of pain and had the plan clear in
his head; but he was indefatigable in revising his work, and would make
as many as eight or ten drafts of a chapter before it satisfied his
judgement. His last autumn and winter were occupied with the succeeding
volume, _The Conquest of England_, and he left it sufficiently complete
for his wife to edit and publish a few months after his death.
The end came at Mentone early in 1883. Two years of life had been won,
as his doctor said, by sheer force of will; but the frail body could no
longer obey the soul, and nature could bear no more.
If in the twentieth century history is losing its hold on the thought
and feeling of the rising generation, Green is the last man whom we can
blame. He gave all his faculties unsparingly to his task--patience,
enthusiasm, single-hearted love of truth; and he encouraged others to do
the same. No man was more free from the pontifical airs of those
historians who proclaimed history as an academic science to be confined
within the chilly walls of libraries and colleges. We may apply to his
work what Mr. G. M. Trevelyan has said of the English historians from
Clarendon down to recent times; it was 'the means of spreading far and
wide, throughout all the reading classes, a love and knowledge of
history, an elevated and critical patriotism, and certain qualities of
mind and heart'.[59] Against the danger which he mentions in his next
sentence, that we are now being drilled into submission to German
models, Mr. Trevelyan is himself one of our surest protectors.
[Note 59: _Clio and other Essays_, by G. M. Trevelyan, p. 4
(Longmans, Green & Co., 1913).]
CECIL RHODES
1853-1902
1853. Born at Bishop's Stortford, July 5.
1870. Goes out to Natal.
1871. Moves to Kimberley.
1873-81. Intermittent visits to Oxford.
1880. First De Beers Company started.
1880. Member for Barkly West.
1883. Commissioner in Bechuanaland.
1885. Warren expedition: Bechuanaland annexed by British Government.
1887. Acute rivalry between Rhodes and Barnato.
1888. Barnato gives way: De Beers Consolidated founded.
1888. Lobengula grants concession for mining.
1889. British South Africa Chartered Company formed.
1890. Prime Minister of Cape Colony.
1890. Occupation of Mashonaland.
1893. Second Rhodes ministry.
1893. War with Lobengula. Matabeleland occupied.
1895. 'Drifts' question between Cape and Transvaal Government.
1895. Jameson Raid, December 28.
1896. January, Rhodes's resignation. Visit to England.
1896. Rebellion in Rhodesia.
1897. Inquiry into the Raid by Committee of the House of Commons.
1899. D.C.L., Oxford.
1899. Outbreak of Great Boer War.
1902. Dies at Muizenberg, March 26.
CECIL RHODES
COLONIST
The Rhodes family can be traced back to sturdy English yeoman stock. In
the eighteenth century they had held land in North London. Cecil's
father was vicar of Bishop's Stortford, a quiet country town in
Hertfordshire on the Essex border; he was a man of mark, wealthy,
liberal, and unconventional, with the rare gift of preaching ten-minute
sermons which were well worth hearing. Of his eldest sons, Herbert went
to Winchester, Frank to Eton; Cecil, the fifth son, born on July 5,
1853, was kept at home. He had part of his education at the local
Grammar School, but perhaps the better part at the Vicarage from his
father himself. The shrewd Vicar soon saw that his fifth son was not
fitted for the ordinary routine of professional life at home, and at the
age of seventeen he was sent out to visit his brother Herbert, who had
emigrated to Natal. Cecil said good-bye to his native land for the first
time in 1870, and thus early elected to be a citizen of the Greater
Britain beyond the seas.
[Illustration: CECIL RHODES
From the painting by G. F. Watts in the National Portrait Gallery]
The brothers had certain points of resemblance, being both original and
adventurous; but they had marked differences. The elder was a wanderer
pure and simple, a lover of sport and of novelty. He could follow a new
track with all the ardour of a pioneer; he could not sit down and
develop the wealth which he had opened up. The management of the Natal
cotton farm soon fell into the hands of Cecil, now eighteen years old,
who noted every detail, and studied his crops, his workmen, and his
markets, while Herbert was absent in quest of game and adventure. It was
this spirit which led Herbert westward in 1871, among the earliest of
the immigrants into the diamond fields: before the end of the year Cecil
followed and soon took over and developed his brother's claim. It was no
case of Esau and Jacob; the brothers had great affection for one another
and fitted in together without jealousy. Each lived his own life and
followed his own bent. As Kimberley was the first field in which Cecil
showed his abilities, it is worth while to try to picture the scene. It
remained a centre of interest to him for thirty years, the scene of many
troubles and of many triumphs.
'The New Rush', as Kimberley was called in 1872, was a chaos of tents
and rubbish heaps seen through a haze of dust--a heterogeneous
collection of tents, wagons, native kraals and debris heaps, each set
down with cheerful irresponsibility and indifference to order. The
funnel of blue clay so productive of diamonds had been found on a bit of
the bare Griqualand Veld, marked out by no geographical advantages, with
no charm of woodland or river scenery. Here in the years to come the
great pits, familiar in modern photographs, were to grow deeper and
deeper, as the partitions fell in between the small claims, or as the
more enterprising miners bought up their neighbours' plots. Here the
debris heaps were to grow higher and higher, as more hundreds of Kaffirs
were brought in to dig, or new machinery arrived, as the buckets plied
more rapidly on the network of ropes overhead. In the early 'seventies
there were few signs of these marvels to be seen by the outward
eye--everything was in the rough--but they were no doubt already
existing in the brain of 'a tall fair boy, blue eyed and with somewhat
aquiline features, wearing flannels of the school playing-field,
somewhat shrunken with strenuous rather than effectual washings, that
still left the colour of the red veld dust'.
Here Cecil Rhodes lived for the greater part of ten years, finding time
amid his work for dreams: living, in general, aloof from the men with
whom he did his daily business, but laying here and there the
foundations of a friendship which was to bear fruit hereafter. Rudd,[60]
of the Matabeleland concessions, came out in 1873; Beit,[61] the partner
in diamond fields and gold fields, the co-founder of the Chartered
Company, in 1875; and in 1878 there came out from Edinburgh one whose
name was to be linked still more closely with that of Rhodes. Leander
Starr Jameson, a skilful doctor, a cheerful companion, gifted with a
great capacity for self-devotion, and with unshakeable firmness of will,
was now twenty-five years old. Rhodes and he soon drew closely together
and for years they were living under one roof. While his casual and
rather overbearing manners repelled many of his acquaintances, Rhodes
had a genius for friendship with the few; and it was such men as these
who shared his work, his pastimes, and his thoughts, and reconciled him
to spending many years in the unattractive surroundings of the mines.
[Note 60: C. D. Rudd (1844-96), educated at Harrow and Cambridge.]
[Note 61: Alfred Beit, born at Hamburg, 1853; died in London, 1906.]
But his life at this time had other phases. Not the least wonderful
chapter in it was the series of visits which he paid to Oxford between
1873 and 1881. The atmosphere of a mining camp does not seem likely to
draw a man towards academic studies and a University life. But Rhodes,
who had a great power of absorbing himself in work, had also the power
of projecting himself beyond the interests of the moment. Seven times he
found opportunity to tear himself away from the busy work of mining and
to keep terms at Oxford; and they made a lasting impression upon him. It
was not the love of book-learning, still less the love of games, which
drew him there. To many he may have seemed to be spending his time
unprofitably. He indulged in some rowing and polo, he was master of the
drag-hounds, he worried his neighbours by nocturnal practising of the
horn. The examinations in the schools, and the more popular athletic
contests, knew little of him. But his sojourn in Oxford was a tribute
paid by the higher side of his mind to education and to the value of
high thinking as compared with material progress; and no one who knew
him well in later life could doubt that the traditions of Oxford had
deeply influenced his mind. On these things he was by nature reticent,
and was often misjudged.
Between the years 1878 and 1888 must be placed the struggle between him
and his rivals for predominance in Kimberley. It had begun with small
enterprises, the purchasing of adjoining claims, the undertaking of
drainage work, the introduction of better machinery. It attracted more
attention in 1880 with the founding of the first De Beers Company, named
after a Boer who had owned the land on which the mine lay. It culminated
in 1887 in the battle with Barnato,[62] his most dangerous competitor,
when by dexterous purchasing of shares in his rival's company Rhodes
forced him into a final scheme of amalgamation. In 1888 was founded the
great corporation of De Beers Consolidated mines. The masterful will of
Rhodes dictated the terms of the Trust deed, giving very extensive power
to the Directorate for the using of their funds. He was already laying
his foundations, though few could then have guessed what imperial work
was to be done with the money thus obtained. The process of amalgamation
was not popular in Kimberley. It resulted in closing down many of the
less profitable claims and in reducing the amount of labour employed.
But it brought in better machinery and it saved expenses of management.
Above all, it curtailed the output of diamonds and so kept up the market
price in Europe and elsewhere. Many people refused to believe that
Rhodes could have outmanoeuvred a man of exceptional financial ability
without using dishonourable means. But there is no doubt that it was
masterful character which won the day, that strength of will which
decides the issue at the critical moment. Many others have been
prejudiced against him merely from the fact that he spent so much time
and energy in the pursuit of 'filthy lucre'. We must remember that
Rhodes himself said: 'What's the earthly use of having ideas if you
haven't the money to carry them out?' We must also remember that all
witnesses of his life agree that the ideas were always foremost, the
money a mere instrument to realize them. The story was told to Edmund
Garrett by one of Rhodes's old Kimberley associates 'how one day in
those scheming years, deep in the sordid details of amalgamation, Rhodes
("always a bit of a crank") suddenly put his hand over a great piece of
No Man's Africa on the map and said, "Look here: all that British--that
is my dream".'[63]
[Note 62: Barney Barnato, born in Houndsditch, 1852; died at sea,
1897.]
[Note 63: Perhaps the best character sketch of Rhodes is that
printed as an appendix to Sir E. T. Cook's _Life of Edmund Garrett_
(Edward Arnold, 1909). Garrett's career as journalist and politician in
South Africa was terminated by illness in 1899.]
But long before this struggle was over, Rhodes had embarked on new
courses which were to carry him still farther. His dreams of political
work began to take shape when Griqualand was created a British province
in 1880. Two electoral divisions were formed, Kimberley and Barkly West;
and it was for the latter that Rhodes first took his seat in the Cape
Parliament in 1880, a seat which he retained till his death. The Prime
Minister was Sir Gordon Sprigg, a politician with experience but few
ideas, more skilled in retaining office than in formulating a policy.
Rhodes was at first reticent about his own projects, and spent his time
quietly studying commercial questions, examining the problem of the
native races and making friends among the Boers. If these friendships
were obscured later by political quarrels, there is no reason to suspect
their genuineness. His sympathy with the Dutch farmers had begun in
1872, when he made a long, lonely trek through the Northern Transvaal,
and it lasted through life. He was interested in farming, he liked
natural men, and was at home in unconventional surroundings. One of the
closest observers of his character said that to see the true Rhodes you
must see him on the veld. So long as the supremacy of the British flag
was assured, there was nothing that he so ardently desired as friendly
relations between British and Dutch, a real union of the races, a South
African nation. It was for this that he worked so long with Jan Hofmeyr,
leader of the Cape Dutch, and earned so many unfair suspicions from the
short-sighted politicians of Cape Town.
Hofmeyr was a curious man. He had a great understanding of the Dutch
character and a great power of influencing men; but this was not done by
parliamentary eloquence. By one satirist he was called 'the captain who
never appeared on the bridge'; by another he was nicknamed 'the Mole',
because his activity could only be conjectured from the tracks which he
left behind him. A third name current in Cape Town, 'the Blind Man,' was
an ironical tribute to his exceptional astuteness in politics. His organ
was 'the Afrikander Bond', a society formed partly for agricultural,
partly for political purposes, a creature which like a chameleon has
often changed its colour, sometimes working peacefully beside British
politicians, at other times openly conducting an anti-British agitation.
He certainly had no enthusiasm for the British flag, but he probably
realized the freedom which the Colony enjoyed under it, and was clear of
all disloyalty to the Crown. The policy dearest to the farmers of the
Afrikander Bond was the protective system for their agricultural
produce. If Rhodes would support this, he might induce the Dutch to give
him a free hand in his plans for expansion towards the North; and this
was needed, because the problem of the North was becoming urgent, and
Sprigg and his party were blind to its importance.
A glance at the nineteenth-century map will show that the territories of
the Dutch Republic, lying on the less barren side of the continent,
tended to block the extension of Cape Colony and Natal towards the
north, the more so as the Boers from time to time sent out fresh swarms
westward and encroached on native territory in Bechuanaland. The Germans
did not annex Namaqualand till 1885, but already their interest in this
district was becoming evident to close observers. Rhodes's most
cherished dream had been the development of the high-lying healthy
inland regions to the north by the British race under the British flag.
But in those days, when Whitehall was asleep and officials in Cape Town
were indifferent, Rhodes saw that his best chance was to convert the
Dutch in the Colony. He hoped to make them realize that, if they
supported him, the development of the interior might bring trade through
Cape Town, which otherwise would go eastward through Portuguese
channels. The building of railways, the settlement of new lands in which
Dutch and English would share alike, were practical questions which
might interest them, and Rhodes was quite genuine in his desire to see
both races going forward together. 'Equal rights for every civilized man
south of the Zambezi' was his motto, and to this he steadfastly clung.
To describe all the means by which Rhodes worked towards this end would
be impossible. He worked hard at Kimberley to furnish the sinews of war;
he used his personal influence and power of persuasion at Cape Town to
win support from Hofmeyr and others; and he was ready to go to the
frontier at any moment when there was work to be done. His first
commission of this sort had been in Basutoland in 1882, when he helped
the famous General Gordon to pacify native discontent; but the following
year saw him at work on another frontier more directly affecting his
programme. The Boers had again been raiding westwards and had started
two new republics, called Goshen and Stellaland, on the route from
Kimberley to the north. Rhodes travelled to the scene of action,
interviewed Mankoroane, the Bechuana chief, and Van Niekerk, the head of
the new settlement, and by sheer personal magnetism persuaded them both
to accept British control. When the Cape Parliament refused the
responsibility, he referred to the Colonial Office in London, and by the
help of Sir Hercules Robinson, the High Commissioner, he carried his
point. When the new Governor, who was appointed by the Colonial Office,
quarrelled with the Boers, it was Rhodes who made up the quarrel, and
when in 1885 the Transvaal Dutch interfered and provoked our home
Government into sending out an overpowering force under Sir Charles
Warren, it was Rhodes once more who acted as the reconciler, and
effected a settlement between Dutch and British. When the indignant
Delarey,[64] provoked by English blundering, said ominously that 'blood
must flow', Rhodes replied, 'No, give me my breakfast, and then we can
talk about blood'. He stayed with Delarey a week, came to terms on the
points at issue, and even became godfather to Delarey's grandchild. He
was never the man to resort to force when persuasion could be employed,
and he usually won his end by his own means.
[Note 64: General Jacobus Delarey, one of the most successful
commanders in the Great Boer War of 1899-1902.]
While his great work in 1883-5 was on the northern frontier he was
growing to be a familiar figure among politicians at Cape Town. We have
an impression of him as he appeared on his entrance into politics. 'He
was tall, broad-shouldered, with face and figure of somewhat loose
formation. His hair was auburn, carelessly flung over his forehead, his
eyes of bluish grey, dreamy but kindly. But the mouth--aye, that was the
unruly member of his face--with deep lines following the curve of the
moustache, it had a determined, masterful, and sometimes scornful
expression.... His style of speaking was straight and to the point. He
was not a hard hitter in debate--rather a persuader, reasoning and
pleading in a conversational way as one more anxious to convince an
opponent than to expose his weakness. He used little gesture: what there
was, was most expressive, his hands held behind him, or thrust out,
sometimes passed over his brow.'[65] Such success as he had in
Parliament he owed less to art than to nature, less to oratorical gifts
than to force of character; but this brought him rapidly to the front.
As early as 1884 he was in the Ministry, and despite his long absences
over his northern work he was judged to be the only man who could become
Prime Minister in the parliamentary crisis of 1890. There was, by that
year, little question that he was the most influential man in South
Africa. He had a large holding in the Transvaal goldfields, discovered
in 1886; he was head of the great De Beers Corporation of Kimberley; and
he was chairman of the newly-created Chartered Company. To many it
seemed impossible that one man could combine these great financial
interests with the position of First Minister of the Colony; but at
least it was clear that the interests of the companies were subordinated
to national aims, that the money which he obtained from mines was spent
on imperial ends, and that his political position was never used for the
promoting of financial objects.
[Note 65: _Cecil Rhodes: a Monograph and a Reminiscence_, by Sir
Thomas Fuller (Longmans & Co., 1910)]
But it is time to return to the development of the north, the greatest
of his schemes and the one dearest to his heart. The year 1885 had
secured Bechuanaland to the river Molopo as British territory, while a
large stretch farther north was under a British protectorate. One danger
had been avoided. The neck of the bottle was not corked up: a way to the
interior was now open. The next factor to reckon with was the Matabele
nation and its chief, Lobengula. They were a Bantu tribe, fond of
fighting and hunting, an offshoot of the Zulus who fought us in 1881.
They had a very large country surrounding the Matoppo hills, and
Lobengula ruled the various districts through 'indunas' or chiefs, who
had 'impis' or armies of fighting men at their disposal. To the
north-east of them lay the weaker tribe of the Mashona, who paid tribute
to Lobengula and whose country was a common hunting-ground for the
Matabele braves. Over the latter, so long as he did not check too much
their love of fighting, Lobengula exercised a fairly effective control.
He himself was a remarkable man, strong in body and mind. Sir Lewis
Michell describes him as he appeared to English visitors: 'A somewhat
grotesque costume of four yards of blue calico over his shoulders and a
string of tigers' tails round his waist could not make his imposing
figure ridiculous. In early days he was an athlete and a fine shot; and
though, as years went on, his voracious appetite rendered him
conspicuously obese, he was every inch a ruler.... Visitors were much
struck by his capacity for government: very little went on in his wide
dominions of which he was not instantly and accurately informed.' He was
an arbitrary ruler, but not cruel to Europeans, of whom a few, like the
famous hunter Selous, visited his capital from time to time. He clearly
held the keys to the north, and it was with him that Rhodes had now to
deal.
The first step was the mission sent out by Rhodes and Beit early in
1888, headed by their old associate Rudd. He and his two fellow-envoys
stayed some months with Lobengula watching for favourable moments and
trying to win his favour. They shifted their quarters when the king did
so, touring from village to village, plied the king and his indunas with
offers and arguments, and finally in October they obtained his signature
to a treaty giving full and unqualified rights to the envoys for working
minerals in his country. In return they covenanted to give him money,
rifles, ammunition, and an armed steamboat.