Chapter XXXIII: THE REIGN OF VICTORIA (continued) (2)

What followed may be described in the words of Mr. Erskine's despatch of the 12th of April to Lord Clarendon. "Just before they were to change horses," he says, "and as they were approaching the bridge of Pikermes, at about twelve or fourteen miles from Athens, they were suddenly fired at from the brushwood bordering the road; and at the first discharge the two gendarmes in front fell, badly wounded, from their horses. The carriage then stopped, and the whole party were compelled to alight, and with the two remaining mounted gendarmes, were hurried up the side of the mountain"--Mount Pentelicus, famous in old Greek days. In the midst of the general panic and uproar, the six foot-soldiers came up and opened fire on the brigands. But alas! they were now too late, whatever their help might have been worth a few minutes earlier. The brigands--of whom Mr. Herbert counted at least twenty-one--had formed themselves into a compact square, of which their captain made the centre. Thus arranged, they retreated gradually under the fire of the soldiers, which must for some little time have placed the lives of the prisoners in the utmost danger. Seeing that they produced no effect, and fearing to injure those whom they had been ordered to protect, the soldiers at last discontinued the pursuit and made off to Athens to give the alarm. The eight unfortunate travellers found themselves wholly at the mercy of this wild-looking band of black-browed men, who dragged them roughly up the slopes of Mount Pentelicus without any regard to the fatigue of the ladies and the strength of the little child who clung to them. At the top of the mountain a halt was made, and the ladies were told that they were to be immediately sent back to Athens, in a country cart that happened to be at hand. Ink and paper were supplied to Mr. Herbert, and he was peremptorily ordered to send by them to his friends in Athens a demand for the immediate payment of a ransom of £32,000. Driven by the countryman who owned the cart, the poor ladies--one of whom (Mrs. Lloyd) little knew that she had parted from her husband for the last time on earth--made their way back to Athens.

On the morning of the 13th, a note, conveyed by one of the mounted gendarmes--who had been liberated at the same time as the ladies--reached Mr. Erskine from Takos, the chief of the brigands, saying that if in three days a sum of £50,000 was not forthcoming for the ransom of the "lords," and if all pursuit throughout the kingdom was not suspended, the prisoners would be put to death. In the course of the day Lord Muncaster arrived in the capital, sent by the brigands to negotiate for the ransom. He brought the same message. Let the troops but come into collision with the brigands, and the lives of all the captives would be at once sacrificed. Mr. Erskine of course renewed the most strenuous representation to the Greek Government on the subject, and received in return from the Minister for War, General Soutzos, a solemn assurance that the brigands should remain unmolested till the prisoners were safely restored. General Soutzos treated the whole matter very lightly, would not allow for a moment that the lives of the prisoners were in any danger, and said that he had no doubt the amount demanded for their ransom might be considerably reduced if their friends felt inclined to make any difficulty about it. No thought of bargaining with the brigands, however, entered Mr. Erskine's or Lord Muncaster s head, and the ransom was speedily collected with the help of the chief banker in Athens, who showed himself most active and efficient. But, alas! no sooner was the money forthcoming, and means of transporting it secured, than a new element entered into the situation, and darkened the whole aspect of affairs. This was no less than a demand on the part of the brigands for a complete amnesty for all offences, not only for themselves, but also for such members of the band as had once belonged to it, but were now in prison. And should this fresh demand be refused, they again threatened to destroy their prisoners. The Greek Government found themselves thrown into a fatal dilemma, and it was to their reckless attempt to extricate themselves from it that the whole of the subsequent tragedy was owing. Under the Constitution that secured the throne of Greece to Prince George of Denmark, the King and Ministers were pledged to put down brigandage, the curse of Greek society, with the utmost rigour of the law. How, then, grant such an amnesty as this to the most powerful and most notorious band in Greece? Besides, the Ministry felt from the first that there was more in the demand than met the eye. Such a condition formed no part of ordinary brigand law, and would not have occurred spontaneously to any band of lawless men who saw the prospect of getting a large sum of money immediately after releasing their prisoners. It appeared only too clearly afterwards that the demand was originally none of their making, and that they were throughout supported and influenced by the corrupt and reckless chiefs of the Greek Parliamentary Opposition. It was a party move, meant to secure the downfall of the Ministry; and the brigands, no less than their unfortunate prisoners, were but pieces in the game. Once suggested, the notion no doubt caught the fancy of Takos, the head of the band, a man of superior education to the rest; and elated by the rank and importance of his captives, he may have made up his mind to secure every possible advantage. The other members of the band were by no means eager for the amnesty, and when a few days later they were flying before the soldiery, they bitterly reproached their chief with having demanded it.

Fully alive to the gravity of the situation, Mr. Erskine sent telegram after telegram to Lord Clarendon. Lord Clarendon's answer was clear and peremptory. Britain could allow no constitutional consideration to weigh against the lives of her subjects. The Greek Constitution had been violated before in the same manner in the Cretan insurrection and in other cases; and Englishmen were not to be sacrificed to keep a weak Ministry in power. The Ministry meanwhile were preparing a desperate attempt to recover their reputation and escape from the snare laid for them. They hoped for a successful _coup de main_, which should at once rescue the prisoners, annihilate the brigands, relieve Government from the responsibility of the ransom, and strengthen the position of the Ministry. At the same time Mr. Erskine was still allowed to believe that, although the amnesty could not be granted, no movement of the troops against the brigands would be permitted until the prisoners were safe. Relying upon this, Mr. Erskine sent a messenger to the brigands, reiterating the assurance of the Government that no pursuit would be attempted; and entreating that they would leave the mountains and bring their prisoners down into the plains, where such delicate men as Mr. Herbert and Count de Boyl need not be exposed to all the hardships of an open-air life. The brigands, who had vowed to trust the word of no Greek Minister, believed Mr. Erskine, left their mountain camp and brought their captives down to the village of Oropus, where they seem to have been on the whole fairly well treated. A few days were then taken up in fruitless negotiations, conducted by a certain Colonel Theagenis, on behalf of the Greek Government--a man afterwards denounced by Sir Henry Bulwer in the House of Commons as the real murderer of the prisoners--and by Mr. Erskine, on behalf of Great Britain.

It is difficult to give a consecutive account of what followed. The Government had made up their mind to take the risk of employing the troops. Mr. Erskine was, above all, anxious that the brigands should not move their prisoners from Oropus, and he seems to have countenanced the action of the Government so far as to consent to a blockade of Oropus, to prevent them from doing so, insisting at the same time in the strongest terms that the brigands should not be in any way molested by the soldiery till the prisoners were safe. Colonel Theagenis was entrusted with the conduct of the whole matter, and it appeared plainly afterwards that he received instructions of which Mr. Erskine knew nothing, and to which he would never have consented. The suspicions of the brigands had been by this time aroused; the Government had been for some days silently moving up troops in the direction of Oropus, and the scouts of the band, posted on all sides of the village, were not slow to discover and report their movement. On the 20th of April, the day before the massacre, letters reached Mr. Erskine from Mr. Herbert, Mr. Lloyd, and Mr. Vyner, which must indeed have thrown him into despair. All spoke of the imminent danger in which these suspected movements of the troops had placed them, and entreated that something might be done to stay the progress of the soldiers. Mr. Noel, an English resident in Eubœa, who had taken a prominent part in the negotiations, telegraphed to say that he felt assured the terms offered would be accepted by the brigands, but that the soldiers must be withdrawn. The band were going to a place not far from Oropus called Sykamenos, whither he was about to follow them with every hope of a successful issue. It was this movement of the brigands, coupled with the orders given to the troops to pursue them should they leave Oropus, that brought about the tragedy of the 21st. On that day the brigands, suspecting the neighbourhood of troops, left Sykamenos before Mr. Noel could come up with them. The troops received information of their movement, followed them, and fired upon them. The brigands, driven to desperation, turned savagely upon their prisoners. They shot Mr. Lloyd before the eyes of the soldiers, who became infuriated at the sight of this murderous act, and made a fierce attack upon the brigands. Six of them were killed, including Christos Arvanitakis (Takos), and one or two were taken alive. The others fled up the country, dragging the other prisoners with them; and upon reaching a place named Skimatari, they stabbed them one by one, Mr. Vyner being the last to suffer. In an hour or two all the labour and anxiety of the last ten days had been rendered fruitless, and four noble and valuable lives had been sacrificed to the culpable rashness and incapacity of those who had sworn to protect and rescue them. Mr. Noel telegraphed the fatal news to Mr. Erskine, and it almost seemed for a time as if another death were to be added to the list, so fearful was the effect of the tragedy upon the man who for ten days had strained every nerve to prevent it.

For a time all England was roused to a frenzy of wrath and grief. At one time it seemed as if nothing less than a war with Greece and the annihilation of her whole existing political system would satisfy English indignation. But there was one person in Greece for whom English people felt almost as much pity as for the victims themselves--and that was the poor young king, who throughout had been the dupe of the unscrupulous partisans about him,--who once in a moment of alarm had made the romantic offer to give himself up to the brigands in the place of the captives,--and who, now that all was over, wrote the most touching letters, full of keen personal shame and grief, to the English Government, while later he made large offers of indemnification out of his own private property to the families of the victims. It was well for Greece that nearly a month elapsed before the question came to be debated to any purpose in Parliament. During the interval the capture of nearly all the brigands had done something toward satisfying the public indignation. The wily leaders of the Opposition, at whose door lay the greater part of the blame, had laid their plans so cunningly that it was extremely difficult to detect and expose them. And after the confessions of the brigands had thrown some light upon this part of the matter, and a steady public opinion in England might perhaps have exacted a heavy penalty for the lives so basely trifled with from those who had used them only as so many pieces in the political game, English attention was diverted by the gigantic impending tragedy of the French and German War; and in the overwhelming interest of those first battle-fields of Wörth and Forbach, the fate of the captives of Marathon was, for the time at least, inevitably forgotten.

The story of the Greek massacre may now give place to the story of the tamer debates in Parliament that still remain to be described. The two great Acts that have already been recorded naturally fill the chief place in the Parliamentary history of the year; but there still remain some discussions that are worth describing, some measures whose fate has to be told. First in order come the naval and military proposals of Mr. Childers and Mr. Cardwell--memorable as showing the naval and military condition of Britain at the opening of the great war year, and as indicating more or less completely the lines upon which reorganisation afterwards proceeded. The Naval Estimates of Mr. Childers carried out very thoroughly those principles of economy on which the Liberal Government had laid so much stress on its accession to power. The proposals of the First Lord also included a scheme for the retirement of officers, and were full of details about the intentions of the Admiralty with regard to ships and guns--those never-ceasing perplexities of the modern naval administrator. The gross estimates reached a total of £9,250,000--three quarters of a million less than those of the previous year, and £1,700,000 less than those of 1868. This saving had been arrived at by different expedients; and, popular as the broad result was, the expedients, taken severally, were most of them doubtfully welcomed both in and out of Parliament. The most notable one had been the closing of several of the dockyards, and the consequent throwing out of employment of several thousand workmen. But Mr. Childers presented not only a justification of his policy to the House, but showed that Government had done very much to lessen the distress of the discharged workmen. Thus, of 2,000 who were thrown out of work by the closing of Woolwich Dockyard, 1,000 had been transferred to other establishments, 200 pensioned, gratuities given to 200, and 300 helped to emigrate. This, in fact, was all that could be done. Government found themselves in a dilemma--either they must abandon retrenchment, or they must harass certain interests. They chose to pursue their policy of retrenchment, trusting to their own remedial measures and to the chances of the market for providing for the discharged workmen. Mr. Childers' proposals with regard to keeping up a proper supply of ships were "to push on the most powerful class of armoured ships and the fastest cruisers," experience having shown that these were the two classes most likely to be of use in modern wars--the one for fighting, the other for pursuit. He had much to say about new guns; he promised to send another flying squadron round the world; he detailed his measures for forming a reserve of sailors; and, above all, he unfolded his new scheme of retirement for officers. The details of this scheme, stated shortly, were that admirals of the fleet were to be compelled to retire at 70 years of age, admirals and vice-admirals at 65, rear-admirals at 60, captains at 55, commanders at 50, and lieutenants at 45. With this he proposed a scale of pensions, and promised that the result would be a considerable benefit to the service and a saving to the country of about £300,000 a year.

FROM THE PAINTING BY W. L. WYLLIE, A.R.A.]

Mr. Cardwell's army proposals need not be described at length, for they merge into the far more comprehensive proposals of the next year, when the war had compelled the country to look its military affairs in the face, and to consent to a thoroughgoing scheme of reorganisation. Still, even in this year, Mr. Cardwell struck the note of a very decided reform. He proposed reductions both in the colonial and the home army, and laid down the two principles, though he did not fully work them out, upon which the reorganisation of 1871 was based--namely, short service and abolition of purchase. He abolished the rank of ensign and cornet, as a first step towards the latter; he announced his plan of enlistments for twelve years, six to be passed in the regular army and six in the reserve, as a preparation for the former. He proposed to disband the Canadian Rifles, the Cape Mounted Rifles, the 3rd West Indian Regiment, and the African Artillery. He reduced the Indian establishment, and proposed an elaborate method of reducing the strength of all home regiments. By all these measures he brought about a reduction of £1,136,900 on the estimates of the previous year, and of £2,330,800 on those of the year before. The figures by which he described the strength of the army at the beginning of this year were:--Regulars and others available for all services, home and foreign, 109,225; second army of reserve, 20,000; militia, 63,000; yeomanry, 15,300; volunteers, 168,477. In other words, a total of 376,002, nearly half of them being volunteers--figures that tempt one to speculate what would have been the result of all this reduction and economy had the German armies made their appearance before London instead of before Paris!

The revenue of the year, as Mr. Lowe announced in his Budget speech, amounted to £76,505,000; a sum of which nearly four millions were due to the new mode of collecting taxes instituted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer--a mode that for the first year caused the revenue to appear far greater than it really was. The expenditure was £68,223,000; and the surplus was devoted to paying about half the cost of the Abyssinian War, to a reduction of the income tax by a penny in the pound, to a reduction of the sugar duties, and to various smaller reductions. In finance, at least, the _annus mirabilis_ cannot be pronounced unfortunate, so far as England was concerned.

The history of Parliament in 1870 must be completed by a mention of a few Bills that became law, and a few that did not. This year saw the passing of a Bill that practically repealed the law that Pitt had carried in order to exclude Horne Tooke from the House of Commons--a Bill, moved by Mr. Hibbert, to remove the civil disabilities of clergymen. This provided that any clergyman wishing to relinquish the office of priest or deacon might do so by signing a deed, to be registered by the bishop. From the moment of his signing, he was to become free to practise any trade or profession, and to sit in Parliament--to become, in fact, a layman. It may be added that a considerable number of distinguished clergy took advantage of the Act soon after it was passed. Mr. Russell Gurney's Married Women's Property Bill was another of great practical importance; but unfortunately its success was only partial. It proposed to give married women the absolute control of their own earnings, instead of allowing the husband to seize them at his pleasure. The Bill was of course directed mainly towards the class of wage-earning people, where the wife often contributed largely to the family stock by the labour of her hands; and no one who had any knowledge of this class could be ignorant of the fearful amount of misery that a drunken or worthless husband might cause by compelling his wife to keep him in drink and idleness. Mr. Russell Gurney's Bill aimed at curing this state of things; and, in spite of the difficulties of the question, the advantage of protecting married women in the possession of their actual earnings was evident to almost everybody. But in the House of Lords, where there were no members pledged to support women's rights, the Bill was severely handled by the law lords and others. The unbelief of Lord Westbury, the peculiar experience of Lord Penzance, induced them to "amend" the Bill in its most essential points. It passed, but passed mutilated; yet its advocates had helped to familiarise the public mind with its principle, and a measure much more consistent and comprehensive became law in a later year. The House of Lords also threw out for this Session the Bill of Sir John Coleridge for abolishing religious tests in the Universities, and also the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill, which the House of Commons had passed. This Bill, which has been described as "a Bill to enable a woman to marry her deceased sister's husband," found great favour with the Dissenters, and was pushed through the Lower House mainly by their exertions. But the House of Lords was more open to High Church influence--Lord Salisbury was a greater power there than Mr. Beresford Hope in the Commons--and was never too willing to pass Bills for the simple removal of disabilities, matrimonial or other.

In the first month of the year, before Parliament met, a terrible catastrophe occurred in the Eastern seas, through which a fine ship-of-war belonging to a friendly nation was run down by an English mail steamer and sunk, the accident being attended by a lamentable loss of life. The United States steam corvette _Oneida_ left the anchorage at Yokohama, the port of Yedo, in Japan, at about five o'clock on the evening of the 24th of January, 1870. Two hours later the noble vessel had sunk beneath the waves and the greater part of her crew had been swept into eternity. It was nearly 7 P.M.; the officers were at dinner below, when the look-out man shouted, "Steamer lights ahead," and the midshipman on watch gave the order to port the helm. The approaching vessel (which proved to be the Peninsular and Oriental Company's steamship _Bombay_) was steering due north, and making for the port of Yokohama; the _Oneida_ appears to have been steering a south-easterly course. Captain Eyre, commanding the _Bombay_, afterwards deposed on oath, that when the _Oneida_ was first sighted, she was about a mile distant, and that he immediately ported his helm, and kept porting it for a considerable time, in order to clear her. While the _Bombay_ was still heading off to starboard, Captain Eyre deposed that he saw the stranger putting her helm hard a-starboard, and crossing the bow of the _Bombay_ with full sails and steam. The night being dark, the vessels were at that moment not more than a hundred feet apart. Captain Eyre instantly stopped his engines, and put his helm hard a-starboard, hoping to go clear of the approaching vessel. Unfortunately the vessels were too close together for this, and a collision occurred, the bows of the _Bombay_ cutting into the starboard side of the _Oneida_, about the mizen rigging. Neither ship was entangled with the other; and Captain Eyre, not hearing or seeing, as he said, any signal of distress from the other ship, and being informed that the _Bombay_ was making water, ordered the engines to be set going at full speed and made the best of his way for Yokohama. The unfortunate crew of the _Oneida_ felt themselves to be cruelly abandoned; for, besides the shock and the danger of the collision itself--in consideration of which the unharmed or slightly harmed vessel ought in common humanity to have waited to ascertain the effects of the accident upon the other, before proceeding on her course--several of the _Oneida's_ guns, which happened to be loaded at the time, were almost instantly fired to attract the attention of the _Bombay_ and bring her back. Two of the ship's boats, containing fifty-six men, floated after she had gone down, and were picked up and brought safely to Yokohama; the rest of the officers and crew--a hundred and twenty in number--went down with the ship. A court of inquiry was held at Kanagawa, in Japan, to investigate the circumstances of the collision, and the result was that Captain Eyre's certificate was suspended for six months. The Board of Trade afterwards ratified the finding of the court of inquiry, and expressed their opinion that the sentence of suspension was "inadequate to the gravity of the offence."

We must now turn to the obituary of the year, omitting, however, according to our custom, the domains of literature and art, which are reserved for a later chapter. A statesman of high rank, a judge of great and long-lived reputation, some illustrious soldiers, were among those who died. Of several of these--of Sir De Lacy Evans, of Sir G. F. Seymour, of Sir William Gordon, and of General Windham--it is not necessary to speak; nor of Dr. Gilbert, the cultivated Bishop of Chichester, once the well-known Principal of Brasenose College. More famous than these was Sir Frederick Pollock, formerly Chief Baron of the Exchequer, who began his public career by coming out as Senior Wrangler at Cambridge in 1806, and ended it sixty-four years later as a judge who had carried into his retirement the respect and affection of his colleagues and the bar. He was, too, a member of a notable family--for Sir David Pollock, once Chief Justice of Bombay, and Field-Marshal Sir George Pollock, the famous Indian soldier, were his brothers. It is rare for three brothers to reach, as they did, the very highest posts in their different professions, especially if, like these, they start with no advantages of wealth or birth. Lord Clarendon, who died on the 27th of June, had started with those advantages, but he had turned them to good account. He was the head of the Clarendon branch of the Villiers family, which has for a long time been Whig; and he carried out through a long official life the best traditions of Whig policy as a diplomatist, Foreign Secretary, and Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, though the chief responsibility for the Crimean War must always rest upon his memory.