Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

Another story, of which Mr. Castell Hopkins also reminds us, recalls still more vividly the power and might of a Queen's influence upon the warriors of her Court —

"It was at the close of the Crimean War, and Sir Colin Campbell was so jealous and angry at the appointment of a junior to the chief command there, after General Simpson's retirement, that he refused at first to go out again when it was thought that the war would be continued. But,' declares Sir Archibald, he yielded his own inclination eventually to that of the Queen, who, at Windsor, it is said, asked him to sit beside her on the sofa, and burst into tears at his continued refusal. He respectfully kissed Her Majesty's hand, and said he could hold out no longer.' It is not indeed difficult to understand a chivalrous soldier giving way at the sight of any woman's tears, though this statement is no doubt an exaggeration of what did actually occur. The Queen herself tells the story a little differently in a letter to Lord Hardinge, and states that after expressing the earnest hope that his valued services would not be lost to the country in the Crimea, he replied that he would return immediately, for that, if the Queen wished it, he was ready to serve under a corporal.'

[ocr errors]

The picturesque figures of the Raleighs and Grenvilles and Drakes and Gilberts of the Elizabethan Court, with their fine phrases and courtly homaging, were not more romantic than the great captains and rulers who have found in the praise of Queen Victoria their richest reward. Read, for instance, what Lord Dalhousie wrote in thanking her for the gracious words with which she welcomed home her Viceroy from his arduous post :

"Such gracious words from a Sovereign to a subject as those with which your Majesty has greeted his return to England create emotions of gratitude too strong and deep to find fitting expression in any other than the simplest words. Lord Dalhousie, therefore, respectfully asks permission to thank your Majesty from his inmost heart for the touching and cheering welcome home, which he feels to be the crowning honour of his life."

Of the worthies of the Victorian era we may say :—

"Servants in Queen, and Queen in servants blest;

Your only glory, how to serve her best ;

And hers, how best the adventurous might to guide,
Which knows no check of foemen, wind or tide."

Read also in this connection what the Duke of Newcastle wrote when faction seemed rife in Parliament, and, the future Empire was darkened by the disasters of the Crimean War :

"I see no chance of public usefulness in such a state of things as we are now reduced to. I often think of our dear Queen, and feel how completely she is not only our main, but our only stay. There is still some chivalry and much loyalty in England; and the throne, occupied as it now is, may keep us above the waters.'

May and did. With but a pronoun changed, statesman, warriors, and governors, under the Queen, have found the wondrous cheer of Her Majesty's unfaltering voice :

:

"We listening, learned what makes the might of words,
Manhood to back them, constant as a star;

Her voice rammed home our cannon, edged our swords,
And sent our boarders shouting; shroud and spar
Heard her and stiffened; the sails heard and wooed
The winds with loftier mood.

"In our dark hours she manned our guns again;

Pride, honour, country, throbbed through all her strain.
And shall we praise? God's praise was hers before,
And on our futile laurels she looks down,

Herself our bravest crown."

Nor is it only as the Lady of the Tournament that the Queen is serviceable to the Empire. Her censure is sometimes as grateful as her praise. There was only one silver lining to the blackness of the cloud which covered Britain when Khartoum fell. It was supplied by the knowledge of that memorable telegram en clair which Her Majesty dispatched to her Cabinet. In the sixteenth century Elizabeth would have boxed their ears. In the nineteenth, Victoria buffeted them not less smartly by her telegram. And it was marvellously comforting to the nation, mourning its heroic dead,

to know that the Queen had rebuked SO severely those whose procrastination had led to the sacrifice of General Gordon.

[graphic]

Sir George Grey continued to do everything that could be done to aid the Indian Government in its struggle with the mutiny. He emptied his own stables, and dismounted his cavalry, in order to furnish the Indian army of deliverance with remounts, while all the resources of South Africa in stores and munitions of war were drained to supply the needs of the Empire. Mr. W. L. Rees, from whose interesting history of the "Life and Times of Sir George Grey" most of these details are drawn, says :

WINDSOR CASTLE.

(From a photograph from the Stereoscopic Co.)

"This was all done without any authority from the Home Government, and simply upon Sir George Grey's own belief that it was necessary for the safety of the Empire.

"These active measures were watched with the keenest interest and delight by Her Majesty and the Prince Consort. In a letter to Mr. C. J. McCarthy on the 24th of October, 1857, Lord Houghton

writes:

"I hear the Queen is in great admiration of Sir George Grey at the Cape, having sent his carriage horses to India and going afoot. What the Queen really admired was the whole conduct of the Governor, the troops, the horses, the specie, the artillery and the munitions of war, the China Army, and the continued reinforcements of every kind, sent in the face of the evident disbelief of Lord Canning in their necessity or the gravity of the crisis which had arisen in India, and in spite of his assertions that he wanted nothing but a few horses, and that it was a mistake to suppose the outbreak a mutiny.

"Ministers in London said nothing. They regarded coldly the efforts made by the Governor at the Cape. The Queen and Prince Albert alone perceived and appreciated the value of the services rendered by Sir George Grey. Yet

these steps were taken against the advice of the Governor-General, and at a fearful personal risk.'"

Before finally denuding the Colony of all its garrison, Sir George Grey, acting in the spirit of ancient chivalry, and dealing with savage chiefs as if they also were men of knightly spirit, visited personally all the great chiefs whose enmity might have endangered the colonists. Riding night and day across the plain and through the Kaffrarian highlands, he sought out the fastnesses in which the chiefs abode, and told them all. He told them of the mutiny, and declared his intention to send every man and horse that

[graphic][merged small][merged small]

He

could be spared to assist the Queen in suppressing the rebellion in India. appealed to them to give him an assurance that in the absence of the troops they would loyally assist in maintaining order and preserving peace. Touched by the manly appeal to the latent chivalry of the savage heart, one chief after another pledged his word to the Governor of the Queen, and not one of these pledges was ever broken. Thus says Mr. Rees :

"All South Africa reposed peacefully while the desperate struggle was proceeding in Bengal, and tribes once savage in their hatred of the British Government gave the great Queen and her Governor their sympathy."

Sir George Grey in the midst of his pre-ooupations in South Africa wrote strongly recommending that the offer of his old friends the Maoris of New Zealand should be accepted, and that a couple of regiments of Maoris should be raised for service in India: "If you won't utilise their fighting instincts in the service of the Empire, you will have to use the forces of the Empire to suppress them." Downing Street refused to listen to his advice or to heed his warnings. Four years later the great Maori war began.

V. THE GRATITUDE OF DOWNING STREET!

Meanwhile Downing Street was making trouble enough at his own door. The German Legion raised for service in the Crimean War had been disbanded and its members located as military settlers in the Cape. The Cape colonists objected to receive the men unless they were accompanied by their women. Downing Street, being consulted, authorised Sir George Grey to give the assurance that the soldiers should be accompanied or immediately followed by German families containing sufficient numbers of young women among whom they could find wives. The soldiers came. But the women did not. As Downing Street cheated the Hottentot soldiers of three-fourths of their pension, so they defrauded the German Legion of seven-eighths of the promised women. The Governor protested against this gross breach of faith. Downing Street quibbled, prevaricated, and finally repudiated its obligations. Meanwhile the disbanded legionaries, left without wives, became a source of alarm to the staid farmers amongst whom they were settled. The Governor at last was driven to arrange for the importation of German women through the firm of Godeffroi of Hamburg, the cost of their transport being secured by debentures issued by the Kaffrarian Government, the sum to be repaid with interest by the colonists. No sooner had the first consignment been successfully married, than Downing Street interfered forbidding any further imports of German women on the ground that it was contrary to national policy,—a curious plea from Ministers of a Queen who had imported her own husband from Germany, and who themselves had originally proposed to settle 20,000 Germans at the Cape. A bitter wrangle ensued, but in the end Sir George Grey carried his point, not without difficulty. The importation was successful, and the immigrants. repaid every farthing of the passage money.

But owing to the limitation of the scheme many Germans remained unmarried. The Government of Bombay apprehending a serious rising in the Presidency, at its wits' end for white troops, dispatched a despairing appeal to Sir George Grey. No one ever appealed to him when the Empire was in peril, and appealed in vain. Sir George. Grey promptly responded to the appeal of Lord Elphinstone by re-enlisting all the Germans who were not married and sending them over to Bombay, where they enabled the Government to surmount its difficulties. Bombay was grateful. The Queen was well pleased. But Downing Street was furious, and hinted not obscurely that Sir George Grey might count himself lucky if he escaped punishment for action so unlawful and subversive of the Constitution.

A change of Ministry only made matters worse. The first act of Lord Derby's new Government was to cut down the vote for Kaffraria without warning from £40,000 to £20,000. The expenditure had been authorised: £20,000 had been spent. What was to be done? Sir George was left with a province to administer, and not a penny piece with which to fulfil his treaty obligations and pay the salaries of the chiefs. Once more the Governor stepped into the breach, and redeemed the credit of the Queen's Government by paying £6,000 out of his own pocket. Two years elapsed before Downing Street, without any application on his part, refunded the money.

It is not surprising that Sir George Grey looked with scant sympathy upon the arrangement by which the Boers had been allowed to establish two slave States under the disguise of Republics in the heart of the South African continent. He reported truthfully to Downing Street that the Sand River Convention and the deed constituting the Orange Free State amounted to a declaration on the part of the English that they abandoned the coloured races to the mercy of the two Republics, and he warned the Imperial Government that the interests of Britain would suffer from such disregard of engagements solemnly entered into. A warning the justification of which, if other justification be wanting, the evidence in the Jameson trial supplies only too well.

Downing Street does not love to have Cassandras in its service, and the strained relations between the Colonial Office and its brilliant and successful Colonial Governor daily became more difficult. It was at first hoped to provoke him into resignation. But behind the Colonial Office Sir George Grey saw Her Majesty, and his loyalty to the Queen forbade his taking offence at the censures and insults of Downing Street. "I have only remained here," he wrote, “because I thought I was useful to Her Majesty and to my country." If they wished to get rid of him they must tell him so frankly. They did not do so then, but they bided their time. They worried him about trifles-refusing, for instance, to pay for two thousand pairs of boots for the German Legion that he raised to safeguard Bombay. He groaned in spirit, but he consoled himself, as many a man has done before him, by the thought that, though Downing Street might be intolerable, not even Downing Street should drive him from the service of the Queen. He wrote:

"I am here beset by cares and difficulties which occupy my mind incessantly and wear out my health. I feel that I have conducted Her Majesty's affairs for the advantage of her service and the welfare of her subjects, whose love, gratitude, and loyalty I have secured for the Queen, and I certainly feel it hard that the reward I should receive should be to have my spirit broken by having accounts which I feel are entitled to the approval of Her Majesty's Government disallowed, thus throwing me into new difficulties; and that this should be done in the uncourteous way it is, and in letters which as an old and loyal Government servant sorely wounds my feelings, is still worse."

It was indeed well for Britain as well as for Africa that there was over and above the discourteous and unsympathetic officials the Lady of the Land, diligently reading all his despatches, and heartily sympathising with her gallant knight in the midst of his difficulties with Downing Street.

But the end was near at hand. In response to a request from the Colonial Office, Sir George Grey drew up a despatch, in which he set forth with lucidity and earnestness the truth about South Africa. He tore to ribbons the Colonial Office fiction that South Africa was worthless, that its people were disaffected, and that the best thing for Britain was to abandon the continent. "The countries which lie beyond the Orange River," he wrote, "are very fertile and productive. Some of them are so to the highest degree. Their extent may be said to be boundless, and in many portions they are capable of carrying a very dense population." In opposition to the Colonial Office policy of shunting the white States and governing the Kaffirs by the sword, Sir George expounded the opposite policy of federating the whole of the South African States and civilising the natives.

This was at the end of September, 1858. A few months later the Volksraad of the Free State passed a resolution in favour of union or alliance with the Cape. In 1859 Sir George communicated the resolution of the Volksraad to the Cape Parliament, suggesting that they should devise a form of feudal union without which the South African States could hope neither for safety nor success.

He was at once rebuked by the Colonial Office, and when he explained and defended his action he was recalled. But the story of that recall and of its sequel bears so directly upon the relation of the Queen to the Empire that it must be told in some detail.

DEA EX MACHINÂ.

VI. THE QUEEN AS Downing Street had its chance at last. "The dangerous man" at the Cape had committed the unpardonable sin-he had dared to advocate the federation of Colonies and States which it was the fixed idea of the Colonial Office not to federate but to abandon. "You have committed yourself to a policy of which Her Majesty's Government disapprove on a subject of the first importance."

That charge was true. They were for disintegration, he was for consolidation. They were for scuttling out of South Africa, he was for laying broad and deep the foundations of an Empire worthy of Britain and her Queen. They were confident that South Africa was a waste and howling wilderness that would hardly keep halfstarved antelopes, and that was haunted by rebellious Boers and irreclaimable savages whom it was not worth powder and shot to keep in order. He knew that it was a fertile domain, rich in minerals, fat with pasture, the destined home of millions of the English race. Their one idea was to shake off all responsibility for the white States and reduce all responsibility for the government of the natives to a minimum of territory in which rudimentary order was maintained by a military garrison. He was for shouldering responsibility, performing duty, federating the European States, and preparing for an indefinite expansion northward of the approval of tribes anxious to share the blessings of civilisation. The two were as opposed as light and darkness, Ahriman and Ormuzd. It was the Little Englander versus the Imperialist, the scuttler against the expander. No wonder then that when the scuttlers and Little Englanders entrenched in Downing Street found that this " dangerous man," who had saved India by his reinforcements at the same time that he had pacified Africa by his presence, was now on the eve of uniting the whole of Austral Africa in a self-governed Federation, the decree went forth that the axe must fall, and that the too-successful Governor must be recalled.

66

Lytton the novelist was Colonial Secretary. The Under-Secretary was Carnarvon, who, twenty years later, was to endeavour in vain to carry out the Federation Sir George Grey was on the point of completing. The Earl of Derby, the Rupert of debate, was Prime Minister. His son, Lord Stanley, had been at the Colonial Office and had done his fair share of worrying the Governor. When it was decided that Downing Street must be avenged, and that Sir George Grey must go, the Cabinet was confronted by the opposition of the Queen. Her Majesty and the Prince Consort made no secret of the fact that they sympathised entirely with Sir George Grey and not at all with his assailants in high places. But officialdom was not to be denied. The decree was passed by the Cabinet. But it was necessary to secure the Royal assent. The circumstances were so critical that the Prime Minister, accompanied by the Clerk of the Council, himself waited upon the Queen at Windsor in order to communicate to her the unwelcome news.

The Queen was indignant. Nor did she refrain from expressing herself freely to the Minister who demanded so shameful a sacrifice. Her Majesty, as more than one

E

« AnteriorContinuar »