Chapter III: Brigandage in Egypt

The summer of 1890 I spent in large part at Paris with Lytton at the Embassy, and was one of the most delightful in my experience, but it contained little of a political nature or that can be repeated here. Our talks were mainly of literature, and more especially of dramatic literature, on which he was just then engaged, the detail of his official work being left principally to his staff, though I would not be understood to mean that he was a mere figurehead. As Ambassador, on the contrary, his political influence at Paris was greater than that of his predecessor, Lord Lyons. With all the latter’s dignity and discretion and solid good sense, he had never succeeded in obtaining any kind of popularity, and in his time the relations between France and England had become the reverse of cordial. Lytton, however, by the very qualities which had proved his defects when in India, had obtained an immediate personal success at Paris, and had in large measure restored the international good feeling. His literary Bohemianism and lack of pomposity, his devotion to the stage, his ready patronage of artists, actors, and those _littérateurs_ who count for so much in Paris journalism, had been a passport for him to favour with the Press, and through the Press to public opinion. Lytton was by taste a Bohemian, and Paris, which is also so largely Bohemian, recognized him as a brother artist. It was impossible to regard him as representative of the _morgue britannique_, of which not only Lord Lyons but Lord Cowley before him had been such notable examples. Treated with a light hand, many a difficult question was in his time easily circumvented, if not permanently solved, and this at the expense of no real dignity. It was felt that he wished well to Frenchmen and French views of life, and that was sufficient.

In the intervals of my Paris visits I find notices of my life in England, showing that I, too, had learned to take life more lightly than in previous years. I busied myself not at all with parliamentary politics, and even about Ireland I ceased to take any absorbing interest. The prospects of Home Rule were better assured just then in all appearance than they had been since Gladstone’s defeat in 1886. The result of the great “Times” prosecution had been a notable victory for the Nationalists, and had re-established Parnell’s character as a responsible statesman at a higher point than ever before in English eyes, so that it was confidently expected that at the next general election Gladstone would be returned to power with a majority sufficient to overcome the opposition of the House of Lords, and carry his Home Rule Bill into law. It was, therefore, with a free conscience that I led an idle life at home, writing my verses and enjoying social pleasures in the company of my friends. It was in that summer that the Crabbet Club, which was to acquire a certain social celebrity, was established on a footing which was to gain for it a character almost of importance. It will not be out of place, seeing that our memoir writers of the day have included it, or rather have not left it unnoticed in their recollections, if I say a few words here as to what it really was.

The Crabbet Club was in its origin a purely convivial gathering, unambitious of any literary aim. It began in this way: When George, Lord Pembroke (the 13th Earl) came of age in 1871, having been a very popular boy at Eton, with many school friends, and afterwards at Oxford, he thought it would be amusing to continue in some measure the life they had led by having them to stay with him once or twice every summer at Wilton, for a day or two at a time, to play cricket, and row on the river, and otherwise divert themselves, and they took the name of the “Wilton,” or “Wagger” Club, and it proved a great success. In 1876, though much older than the rest of the members, I was asked to join it as one who had known the Herberts from their school days. Pembroke was staying with me at Crabbet, and his two brothers and their sister Gladys (afterwards Lady Ripon), and several of their friends, and several of mine, and I drove them all to Epsom for the Derby (Silvio’s year), and we had a cricket match and a lawn tennis handicap (lawn tennis was in the process of being invented, and we played on a court 20 feet longer than what afterwards became the regulation length), and it was on this occasion that I joined the club. The party at Crabbet had proved such a success that the next year it was proposed that the club should make one of its regular meetings there, and so it gradually came about that the members came to Crabbet annually. The members of the club were never more than a few, a dozen to twenty, and consisted, besides the Herbert brothers, of Eddy Hamilton, who was afterwards Gladstone’s private secretary, Lord Lewisham, Jocelyn Amherst, Granny Farquhar, Lionel Bathurst, with Harry Brand (afterwards Lord Hampden), Nigel Kingscote, Godfrey Webb, Button Bourke, Frank Lascelles, Mark Napier, and half-a- dozen more of my own intimates, and these came regularly to Crabbet every summer, and we gradually adopted the “Crabbet Club” as the name of our branch.

Though we professed no kind of politics, and looked to amusement only, nearly all the members of it were Tories, two or three of them in Parliament, and when in 1882 I took the somewhat violent line I did about Egypt and war ensued, several of the members taking offence ceased their attendance, and the Club as far as the Crabbet meetings were concerned became less popular, and this state of things was aggravated when I stood for Parliament as a Home Ruler in 1885 and 1886, and it was all but submerged by my imprisonment at Galway. Hardly any of the old Wilton members would answer the invitations to it, and Pembroke himself, the most tolerant of men, as an Irish landlord with large interests at stake in the county of Dublin, felt it a grievance that I should have identified myself with the Land League and the Plan of Campaign. All this was natural enough, and I could not complain of the defection. The Club as the “Crabbet Club” was still continued, but reconstructed on different lines with a number of young men, Oxford undergraduates, most of them professing Home Rule opinions. The chief of these were the two Peels, Willy and George, sons of the Speaker, Arthur Pollen, Herbert Vivian, Leo Maxse, Percy Wyndham (son of Sir Hugh), Theodore Fry, Theobald Mathew, Artie Brand, and Loulou Harcourt, the only three of the old set being Mark Napier, Eddy Hamilton, and Nigel Kingscote.

The young men thus got together, most of them fresh from the Universities, though also bent on amusement, had tastes more intellectual than their predecessors, and besides our lawn tennis handicaps, we had much after-dinner speaking, and a verse competition with the election of a poet laureate for the year. The Club was in this condition when in 1889 George Wyndham, becoming a member, took it in hand, and seeing its intellectual capabilities brought new blood into it by introducing friends of his own, already holding a certain position in the political world, and who have since no few of them climbed to fame. Among these were George Curzon, Harry Cust, Houghton (now Lord Crewe), Frederick Locker, Umphreville Swinburne, cousin of the poet, St. George Lane Fox, Eddy Tennant, Laurence Currie, George Leveson Gower, Esmé Howard, Elcho, Dick Grosvenor, Alfred Douglas, Charles Gatty, Morpeth, and his brother Hubert Howard, and on a single occasion Oscar Wilde, and it was in the company of these that our meetings of the early nineties were held. They were really brilliant meetings, with post-prandial oratory of the most amusing kind, and were productive of verse of a quite high order. The number of the members was limited to twenty, and there was much competition when a vacancy occurred. The poetry of the Crabbet Club has been preserved in print, and is one of the curiosities of literature, deserving a place, I venture to think, in company with the best verse of a not serious kind, including even perhaps that of the Mermaid Tavern. My own part in these meetings, which were essentially convivial, was that of Chairman and President, an anomalous one seeing that I was a teetotaller, but which yet worked well.

The latter half of the summer of 1890 was darkened for me by the final illness and death of my cousin, Francis Currie. He had been my Mentor, not always in the ways of wisdom, during my youth at Paris, and had remained there a constant and very dear friend for close on thirty years. On my visit to Paris in the Spring I had found him ill with an ominous cough, and other symptoms of a decline, but his French doctor, whom I consulted about him, persisted in declaring that it was nothing more than the legacy of a fever he had long before contracted in India while serving in the campaign of the Mutiny, and encouraged him to go for change of air to the Alps, though to my eye, and to that of his faithful _bonne_ Julienne he was already “_un homme frappé_.” Now, however, soon after my return to the Paris Embassy in July, I learned that he was at Aix les Bains, and, as it seemed, in an almost hopeless state. This broke short my stay at Paris, and took me first to Aix, and then moving him away from the great heat there to Glyon in Switzerland, where, a month later, in spite of our care, he died. The history of those few weeks, as of the rest of the summer of 1890, belongs, if ever I write it, to my most private memoirs.

On the 18th of October we again left England for Egypt, spending three more weeks on our way with the Lyttons at Paris, and then on by Marseilles to Alexandria and Sheykh Obeyd, where we once more spent the winter. The political position in Egypt at this time was as follows: Riaz Pasha was still in office under the Khedive Tewfik, and the provinces of Lower Egypt, laxly ruled, were much disturbed with brigandage, especially in our immediate neighbourhood. Riaz, who at that time was working with the Khedive in secret opposition to Baring and the British Occupation, allowed the brigandage to continue, with the idea that it would serve as a proof of the unpopularity of the English _régime_ and its powerlessness to preserve order. Baring was occupied now almost exclusively with the struggle to make both ends of Egyptian finance meet, being convinced on his side that a prosperous balance sheet was the best argument he could use with the British public in favour of retaining Egypt as a permanent British dependency. In this he was supported by Lord Salisbury at the Foreign Office, who had made up his mind, now that the Wolff Convention for a withdrawal of the British garrison had failed, to stay on in military occupation without any legal settlement of England’s position on the Nile. It was argued that the legal road to such a settlement had been barred by the Sultan, who, when the Convention had been agreed to, had withheld his signature of ratification. Though I did not know it at the time, our Queen (Victoria) had taken the Sultan’s action as a personal slight, seeing that she had affixed her own royal signature in ratification before the Sultan’s refusal, nor is it possible to say that she was without justification in feeling the matter strongly. In accordance with this, Baring was beginning those changes in the fiscal and administrative domain which were intended to transfer all real power in Egypt, little by little, from the Turco-Circassian class represented by Riaz which he had hitherto patronized, into his own. The new policy, however, was as yet only in embryo, and the intention of remaining in Egypt was not avowed. It was impossible to do so openly, not only through the fear of trouble with France, but also because Liberal opinion in England was not prepared for it, and unless it could be converted to the idea before the next general election, which was to take place in 1892, it was always possible that Gladstone, coming once more into power, might suddenly reverse the whole process of absorption, and without further waiting recall the troops from Cairo.

It was with this fear before his eyes that Baring had obtained the services in Egypt of Alfred Milner, a journalist of distinction, the same whom I had known in 1884 as sub-editor of the “Pall Mall Gazette” under Stead (see “Gordon at Khartoum”), and who, a year later, had been taken on by Goschen as his private secretary. It was through Goschen’s recommendation that Baring gave him a place in Egypt of £1,000 a year at the Ministry of Finance, nominally for administrative work, but in reality with a mission of organizing a press campaign in London in favour of a continuance of the Egyptian occupation. For this work no man could have been better chosen. He was nominally a Liberal, and had stood as a supporter of Gladstone at the general election of 1885, while his experience in Northumberland Street had put him in touch with all the chief writers of the English Liberal press. No man better than he knew the length of the English electoral foot. At Cairo, without appearing personally in his journalistic character, he knew how to bring the case he had to argue forward by encouraging the various Englishmen officially employed there to write articles in the monthly magazines and elsewhere in praise, not of their own, but of their fellow-administrator’s achievements in the way of reform, knowing well that if it could be proved that Egypt, instead of a burden on the British Exchequer, was becoming a paying concern, the battle would be won with the new government, should a Liberal one come into office, even with Mr. Gladstone. And so, in fact, it happened. The appearance of Milner’s very able volume, “England in Egypt,” in which he drew together all these threads of argument in lucid and attractive form, and which was published a few months before the general election of 1892, effected, as I will show later, exactly the object aimed at. Milner’s reward for this service was not delayed. The same year he was relieved from his nominal functions in Egypt, and given the important place at home of Chairman of the Inland Revenue Board. I saw him pretty frequently at Cairo during his stay there, and liked him, as I had liked him when in his humbler position as Stead’s assistant editor. He did not display, at that time, anything of that violent Imperialism which led him later to aspire to the sublime heights of Tory officialdom which he now occupies.

This was the position in Egypt in the early spring of 1891. I was now on excellent terms with Baring, whom I found willing to listen to any suggestions I might make to him for improving the lot of the fellahin, a matter which I understood, while he, shut up in his office and seeing practically nothing of native Egypt beyond the tame officials whom he had attracted to his camp, lived in comparative darkness, and I was able in this way to effect a good deal in the direction that most interested me, and I did not fail to bring before him once more the case of Arabi’s return; but he was still too strongly opposed to it, though, he explained, if it was decided to occupy Egypt permanently he should have no objection. Failing in this, as far as Arabi was concerned, I now limited my pleading to an attempt to interest him in other members of the former National Party, and at the suggestion of my old friend, Sheykh Mohammed Abdu, who was now living in my part of Egypt as judge of our chief country town, Benha, and whom we now saw pretty frequently, I brought before him a plan that he should take these old Nationalists into his councils and substitute for the Circassian Pashas who had so far been the only class of Mohammedans permitted to hold office under the restored régime since Tel-el-Kebir, an Egyptian fellah government. Neither Riaz, nor Nubar, nor any other of the ministers who had held office during the past seven years, though patriotic some of them to the extent of having it for their aim to get rid of all foreign elements in the administration, had taken any real interest in bettering the condition of the fellahin, and it seemed to me a lack of intelligence on Baring’s part that he had failed to understand the popularity he might have gained by the creation of a fellah ministry, and the comparative ease with which he could have introduced the reforms he professed to have at heart, and really at that time had. I find this alluded to in my diary:

“_20th Feb._—A few days ago, there being a ministerial crisis, I wrote to Baring suggesting that he should take new men into the ministry instead of Riaz and the Circassians, who, despising the fellahin, look only to their own class interests. He answered me favourably, and to-day I called on him, and after luncheon we discussed the position. Riaz has already given in, so nothing is to be done at present; but he expressed himself willing to make the acquaintance of any men of the fellah class whose names I could suggest, and I am to write to him again on the subject in a few days. He fully admitted that Riaz was an obstructive; ‘but where,’ he said, ‘is there anyone better?’ It was a doubtful question whether it was possible to put Mohammedans on any road of reform. I said: ‘If you give up that hope you give up everything, but you have not tried the Liberal party to help you in reforms.’ He said he ‘was quite willing. If the National party in 1882 had not allied itself with the army it might have been supported.’ ‘That was the fault,’ I said, ‘of the Joint Note.’ He agreed that ‘the Joint Note was a mistake,’ and, I think, was impressed with what I said, and we parted on the understanding that I was to give him the names of persons I thought able to afford him political help, but he enjoined on me complete secrecy. ‘I will take some opportunity,’ he said, ‘of making their acquaintance, but there is a difficulty sometimes in my seeing the people.’ I shall wait until Hassan Pasha Sherei returns from Upper Egypt, and then see if we cannot make out a fellah Cabinet together.” I have a few letters which passed between me and Baring at this time. They are of importance as showing that the policy of introducing reforms through native Egyptians of the Mohammedan Reform Party was laid before Sir Evelyn Baring, and its advantages more or less acknowledged by him full fifteen years before he, as Lord Cromer, adopted it as the only one which could give a hope of making self-government in Egypt possible. (See his Reports for the year 1905.)

Our life at Sheykh Obeyd that Spring was not without incident, as our immediate neighbourhood was disturbed almost nightly by gangs of robbers, who visited the country houses round, breaking into them in the night time and coming in armed conflict with such of the owners as resisted them. The bands were composed principally of Bedouins, with whom were associated certain refugees from Upper Egypt and a few broken men escaped from the prisons at Toura, but the direction of them was in Bedouin hands. For this reason we, who were on good terms with the tribes, were left unmolested, though every one of our near neighbours suffered. This is from my diary:

“_7th March._—Last night at half-past twelve I heard a great noise of dogs barking, and occasional shots. I went out on to the balcony and listened, and was about to go to bed again, for the guards have a habit of firing without reason in the night to show they are awake, when I heard cries, and I called to Deyf Allah, our head ghaffir, and asked him what it was. He answered, ‘there are robbers at Selim Bey’s.’ I consequently dressed hastily and ran down, having first awakened Anne, and taking my Winchester rifle and a revolver sallied forth, followed by Deyf Allah and Mahmud the Berberin. It was a dark night and I held my rifle ready to fire as we went through the palm grove where I thought I saw one or two people moving. As we got near to Selim Faraj’s house (a quarter of a mile from ours) the noise of the dogs increased and mixed with it there were groans, while occasional shots were still being fired at a distance. I went cautiously up to the house where I met an Arab with whom I exchanged greetings. He was probably one of Selim’s guards. At the door lay a fellah groaning with his head cut open. There was a light at the window, and women began to scream. On my coming close they told me they had been robbed, and I found the window bars wrenched open. Presently Selim appeared at the door [he was a County Court Judge, a Syrian Christian] his face a coagulated mass of blood, and he let me in and told me the history of what had happened. There had been a noise of knocking at his door, and on his opening it, thinking it was the guard, he received a blow from a _nabout_ (a quarter staff) on his shoulder, but managed to slip back inside and bar the door. Then a number of men attacked the house, calling on him to open, and on his refusal they broke through the windows, while he struck at them with a meat chopper, but they pushed him back and got through, six of them, and called for his money. He proposed to them to pay next day, but they declined to wait and broke open his chests of drawers and made search. While this was going on, he hid with his little girl in the scullery, but later issued out again to defend his property, and received three wounds on his head with some sharp instrument. Then the robbers, having found the money they were looking for in his pockets, £37, and hearing me coming, for there was a cry of ‘_tarbush_,’ their watchword for the police, decamped. The wounded fellah was a servant whom they had cut down outside with their _nabouts_, but nobody paid him the least attention, and I had great difficulty in getting him carried inside the house. The ladies begged me to stay on with them, but I refused, as I had my own people to look after, and so went back, and nothing further happened till daybreak. On my return in the morning I found Selim in bed, and heard his story again. The men, he said, were nearly naked, but had their faces masked. They spoke the Mogrebbin dialect. They were Arabs of the West. I then went with Sheykh Hassan Abu Tawil, the chief of our local Arabs and a tracker, and we followed the track of seven men, which was very distinct in the sand, running towards Matarieh. When within a quarter of a mile of the railway station there, they had sat down and then separated, one who had been wearing shoes going to the ostrich farm, the rest towards the tents of Prince Ahmed Pasha’s guard. It is generally thought that they are local people, though Abu Tawil insists they are Mogrebbins, who once lived near the Obelisk (of Heliopolis), and come back every year to rob. One of them had enormous footprints, probably a Negro. I have taken Selim Bey into Cairo, first to Baring, who, however, was too busy to see him, and then on with a note from him to Baker Pasha, the English Chief of Police, an old military fogey whom I worked up into unwonted action by telling him that the state of the country was worse than either Greece or Asia Minor.”

The curious part of this episode, though I do not find it in my diary, was Selim Bey’s attitude in the affair. He was a native Christian Judge, and had been a man of the law all his life, but it was with the greatest difficulty that I could persuade him to report the attack made on him to the police. “It would only put me on bad terms with the neighbours,” he said, worse than those he was already on, for he was very unpopular, and it was only on my declaring that I would myself report it that he consented to go in with me to Cairo.

“_14th March._—The attack on Selim Bey has made a stir and his house is guarded by the regular police. The Mudir has been there and Baker Pasha. They have made nine or ten arrests, among them the two Ghaffirs. Poor old Eid, our _bowab_ (gatekeeper), being one of them. I found him sitting disconsolately among the prisoners with his little child he is so fond of. I am sorry I troubled myself in the matter, for I do not believe one of the arrested men had anything to do with the business, but this is the fourth serious case round about us in eighteen months, and last time they killed a man, and a woman died of fright. Selim Bey’s wound is rather serious, and the servant may yet die; he is in hospital. The Mudir took from me a deposition, but it was very meagre, and I had a difficulty in preventing the insertion in it of things quite untrue.”

This affair put an end for the time to the night attacks. I came to the conclusion later that the tolerance the bands had so long enjoyed had been due to Riaz’ tacit complicity joined to Baker’s muddle-headed incapacity (he was replaced soon afterwards). I took advantage of it to draw a moral for Baring, and wrote a letter to him recapitulating my arguments in favour of a fellah government, sending him a list of the names of men of the fellah party who might make up a Reform Ministry. The list was drawn up in consultation with Sheykh Mohammed Abdu and Mohammed Moelhi. These are the names:

Hassan Pasha Sherei of Minieh.

Baligh Bey.

Emin Bey Fikri.

Saad Effendi Zaghloul.

Ahmed Effendi Mahmoud.

Ibrahim Effendi el Wakil.

Mahmud Bey Shukri.

Ahmed Bey Heshmet.

Yusuf Bey Shoki.

Sheykh Mohammed Abdu.

It is to be remarked that this list includes the name of Saad Zaghloul, whom fifteen years later Cromer made Minister of Public Instruction, as well as Sheykh Mohammed Abdu’s, afterwards Grand Mufti, whom he declared to be the chief hope of Liberal Islam in Egypt. Baring, however, missed his real opportunity by neglecting my recommendation of Hassan Sherei, who politically was of far greater weight than any of them, and who had died before Baring could bring himself to accepting a fellah Ministry. “Baring, however, answers: ‘I do not think there is a ghost of a chance of the Khedive forming a fellah Ministry.’ Still Baring may come to it, as Riaz has been coquetting with the French, and has brought about a fine diplomatic storm. Our only policy is to wait the disappearance, one after the other, of the old ministers, and sooner or later they must come to us if they do not annex. Sherif is gone and Nubar, and now Riaz seems going.

“_4th April._—To Cairo and saw Baring. I asked him first about the drink shops, and he said that though he still hoped to be able to issue his regulations, there was great opposition to these for political reasons from the French; the question of public security was much more important; it was a difficult job; he should put an end to it in time, but he hardly knew how; with regard to the native government it was impossible to get men capable and honest; things were going badly and were leading to a new smash-up; he had only to work on as he could. I asked him what he thought would happen if we evacuated. He said everything would go to smash, but we should not evacuate. I said we might be obliged to do so if there was a change of government at home. He said, ‘I shall protest against it, and, if it is insisted on, I wash my hands of the consequences.’ I said, ‘It is impossible you should not be responsible if you do nothing to prepare for it.’ He said, ‘They are all alike (meaning the Egyptians). I know most of the men you wrote of.’ ‘And Hassan Sherei?’ I asked. ‘No, not Hassan Sherei, but they are all alike.’ He said, ‘The Khedive is in favour of reform.’ ‘Yes, as long as he thinks you stronger than the French, but if England were forced to evacuate, you would see how soon he would go over.’ ‘I daresay. My experience of Easterns is all that way, but we shall not evacuate; we shall have a war with France.’ I reminded him of our conversation of 1883, when I told him he could make nothing of Tewfik and the Circassians. He said, ‘Whom would you have had? There would only have been Halim, and it would have been the same thing. At any rate, it is too late now to change.’ And so we parted.”

All this is of interest now as showing how little reality there was in the excuse so commonly made for the breach of our declarations that we were going to leave Egypt, and that our remaining on there was thrust upon us against our will. It was only true in the sense that it was impossible to leave Egypt and at the same time remain its lords and masters politically; only one way was really possible, and that we always refused to take, to restore the National party with its liberal ideas, and thus earn its gratitude and confidence. Egypt might then have remained, not a dependency of the British Empire, but its very good friend and the faithful guardian of the route by the Suez Canal to India. The mistake made on this head by Baring was among the many causes that led, as I shall show, to England’s being obliged to take part in the quarrel between France and Germany in the great war of 1914. Lord Cromer’s obstinacy on this point was a misfortune. Another was the unlooked-for secession which occurred that spring of Lord Randolph Churchill from the counsels of the Tory party at home. Churchill had, ever since 1882, been a powerful advocate with Lord Salisbury of Egypt’s claim to a restoration of her independence so unwisely taken from her in that year, and his quarrel now with his party left my advocacy of Egyptian liberty without support at the Foreign Office of effective Cabinet kind.

We left Sheykh Obeyd for Europe in April, taking Rome again on our way home and Paris.

“_23rd April_ 1891.—Landed at Naples this morning, having finished a letter yesterday to Lord Salisbury about Egyptian affairs, and I hope he may pay the attention to it it deserves.

“Having seen our things through the custom house we drove to Agnano and the Grotto del Cane. The lake which used to be the beauty of the place has been dried up these twenty years by a French company, which thought to find the ancient Roman town but found nothing; their operations have left a desolation hideous to the eye. How horrible civilized man is. All day the spectacle of these Neapolitans in their modern slop clothes has been to me a nightmare; all nature is defiled by them. What countenances of filthy passions! what abominations to the senses! what foul rubbish heaps! what stenches! We looked into the Grotto del Cane where criminals they say were cast in the days of Nero. It must have been a merciful death; witness the custode’s little dog which has ‘died daily’ there for sixteen years and still wags its tail at each new performance. A nightingale was singing, the only thing quite in harmony with the beauty of the sky and hills. Later we saw the young Duke, the heir to the Italian throne, a small timid-faced young man, very unlike the House of Savoy of which he is to be the head. The prince is physically unimposing, though on horseback he looks well enough.

“_At Rome, 24th April._—To Monsignor Stonor’s, who showed me a huge correspondence he has been having with O’Shea on the subject of a libel committed on him by Dr. McCormack, Bishop of Galway, O’Shea having appealed to the Pope. There was one specially interesting letter he gave me to read. It related to Parnell’s doings with Chamberlain in 1885, and his acceptance of a local government scheme, also to the part played by O’Shea, Dr. O’Dwyer, and Cardinal Manning in the appointment of Dr. Walsh to the Archbishopric of Dublin. They had all, according to the letter, guaranteed Dr. Walsh as a sound champion of law and order. ‘Law and Order,’ however, meant another thing in 1885 from what it has meant since. Monsignor Stonor says that Cardinal Moran was already appointed to Dublin and on his way from Australia to Rome, when his nomination was reversed and Dr. Walsh appointed instead. He laments now the ignorance of the Vatican, which sees in Ireland only a faithful Catholic land oppressed by a Foreign Government. I am staying on at the Minerva, Anne and Judith having gone home straight from Naples.

“_25th April._—To the Irish College where I saw my old friend the Monsignore Rector, who spoke despondingly of Ireland, praying only that God’s will might be done. Not so Prior Glyn and Archbishop Walsh whom I next saw. They are very confident of beating Parnell out of Ireland, and winning the English elections (next year); if not they agree that the cause of Home Rule is hopeless, for Irish America would not continue to support a parliamentary struggle, but would fall back on secret societies and assassination. Dr. Walsh estimates Parnell’s party in Ireland after the elections at sixteen out of a total of eighty Home Rule Members. Prior Glyn’s last words to me were ‘We shall meet again at College Green when the Parliament is opened.’

“_28th April._—Called on Dufferin at the Embassy, who showed me a number of drawings he had made in former times, including one of his mother, done at Athens in the year of our first acquaintance, 1859. He talked a good deal on Eastern subjects, but he skilfully avoided politics, making it clear that he wished the visit to be one of friendship only.”

At Paris I stayed four days, principally with the Lyttons, the talk of the day being of the French failure at Tonkin.

“_30th April._—To a coiffeur in the Rue de la Paix to be trimmed and washed and combed after the fashion of the country. The man who attended me was very voluble, having been a soldier in Tonkin and a blood-thirsty one to boot, by his own showing. ‘Ah, Monsieur,’ he exclaimed, ‘quel gouvernement que le notre, un gouvernement qui ne sait rien faire marcher. Figurez vous qu’on vous envoie des civils pour gouverner la Colonie, des hommes de science qui s’imaginent que tous les hommes sont frères. Ce n’est pas cela qu’il faut à la Colonie, en agissant avec des brutes il faut être brutal. Si j’avais été nommé gouverneur pendant un mois seulement, j’aurais exterminé tout ce monde Tonquinois. Il faut les assommer, Monsieur, comme fait le gouvernement Anglais aux Indes. Voilà un gouvernement qui a la main raide; c’est ce qu’il faudrait à nos colonies.’ He asked me whether I was not of his opinion. I said, ‘Perhaps not quite.’”

On my arrival a few days later in London I had a momentary hope about Egypt, seeing it announced in the “Times” (13th May) that the Riaz Ministry had resigned. I had heard the news the night before from Rivers Wilson, and was full of hope that the new men who, the “Times” said, were to take their place would be of the Fellah Party, but the hope was speedily dispelled, as it proved to be merely a shifting of places, no single member of the new Ministry being of the National Party or of the native fellah class. Also Lord Salisbury, 21st May, made a speech about Egypt, which seemed to exclude all thought of preparing for evacuation. It put an end for a while to my pleading for the Egyptian cause, except with my few political friends, Evelyn, Labouchere, Auberon Herbert, and Sir Wilfrid Lawson. Soon after this:

“_2nd June._—I saw Sir William Gregory in London, who was interesting himself in the hoped-for return to Egypt of the Ceylon exiles. We agreed that Lord Salisbury was hopeless, and that we had better put Labouchere on our Egyptian business, so to Labouchere I went. He has moved into a delightful house in Old Palace Yard exactly opposite the Houses of Parliament. I met him on the doorstep just coming in from the House, in an old skull-cap which he wears instead of hat, and he took me in to luncheon. We talked about Egypt, as to which he has always been sounder than any other politician except Randolph. I was glad to find that he was not prepared to evacuate _unconditionally_, but intended, when the Liberals came into power, to get Egypt neutralised, and I think he will serve us better than anyone else can. ‘If you have any influence with the French,’ he said, ‘get them to propose terms of neutralization.’ I explained to him what the position in Egypt was. He was very amusing about the actual state of the Liberal party, ‘Gladstone in his dotage pulled this way by one and that way by another. They don’t expect a dissolution until next year, but hope to keep the old man alive like the Tycoon of Japan, even after he is dead.’ All agree that there will be a general break up in the party when Gladstone dies. Labouchere is looking old, he tells me he is fifty-eight, but I trust he may last long enough some day to lead his party.”

With Lawson I had a long talk, June the 4th, and “found him nearly as much a pessimist about the human race as I have become. In England he looks to the advent of a really democratic parliament as a last chance, beyond which, if it fails, there is nothing to hope.” With Morris, too, whom I again saw much of, I found the same political despondency. He had just published his “News from Nowhere.” “The picture he draws in it of social communism is pretty, but he, too, is not very hopeful of its ever coming true. I am determined now to get on with my ‘Secret History of the Invasion of Egypt,’ so as to have it ready for publication when Gladstone comes back to office. My old friend, too, Eddy Hamilton, I saw. I found him occupying the ground floor rooms of No. 10, Downing Street. His sitting room is that in which the Cabinet Councils have always been held, and many a scurvy decision been come to in the last hundred years.” Hamilton was now permanent official head of the Treasury, and the rooms had been lent him by Lord Salisbury who did not occupy them. He was suffering, however, with the disease, creeping paralysis, of which some years later he died, and we did not talk much on Egypt or on politics.

In my disappointment about Egypt I turned with redoubled zest to my social pleasures of the year before, and at this time saw much of that interesting group of clever men and pretty women known as the “Souls,” than whom no section of London Society was better worth frequenting, including as it did all that there was most intellectually amusing and least conventional. It was a group of men and women bent on pleasure, but pleasure of a superior kind, eschewing the vulgarities of racing and card-playing indulged in by the majority of the rich and noble, and looking for their excitement in romance and sentiment. But this is not the place in which to describe the life we led, though it well deserves being eternalized in print. It harmonized well with my literary work, and the verses I was preparing for a new edition of the “Sonnets and Songs of Proteus.” This William Morris had proposed to print as one of the earliest volumes of the Kelmscott Press, and I was much with him in connection with it.

“_10th June._—There is a great turmoil in the papers about Lord Salisbury’s Treaty or Agreement with Italy in 1887. It appears now that King Humbert told Prince Napoleon about it, and at last it has come out. This coincides with the change of policy in Egypt, and the determination to remain there.” [This Agreement, which has never been officially admitted by our Foreign Office, related to an intended seizure by Italy of Tripoli, and a promise that England would help Italy if it led to a quarrel between her and France. The reality of the agreement, however, has since been acknowledged by Crispi in his Memoirs.]

To London in the evening and dined in Park Lane (a small dinner arranged by George Wyndham, in which I was to meet Arthur Balfour and bury the hatchet with him of our Irish quarrel). The party consisted of George and his wife, Lady Clifden’s daughter, Miss Ellis, Mrs. Hardinge, Lord Edmund Talbot, Bo Grosvenor (Lord Ebury), Charles Gatty, with Balfour and me. It was a pleasant party, and after the ladies had left we stayed on talking till past one o’clock. I had not met Balfour since my Irish campaigning, and we did not talk politics, discussing instead literature, and especially the influence of Arabia on the Middle Ages. Balfour was agreeable and the conversation brilliant, and he showed especial amiability to me as if to make up for past severities, offering me a place in his brougham to go home in when we went away. Why, indeed, should we quarrel? He has mitigated his prison rigours in Ireland and I am aloof from politics.

“_11th July._—Arabi’s case has been brought forward in Parliament by Labouchere, and the Foreign Office answer is fairly satisfactory. Ferguson says that the Government has uttered no _non possumus_ about the exiles, and is seeing what can be done.

“All the world is agog just now about the visit of the German Emperor to London, and the Liberals are just as absurd (in their adulation) as the Tories. I met Justin McCarthy to-day in the street with his son Huntly, and walked some way with them. They were jubilant about the Carlow election and Parnell’s collapse, but Huntly told me he did not intend to come forward again in Parliament, but would stick to literature. His talk about Egypt was quite in the Imperialistic vein, justifying what I have always predicted that the Irish, once free, would be more English than the English in enslaving the weaker nations.

“_15th July._—To see Cardinal Manning, taking with me a basket of roses from Crabbet for his birthday, of which I was reminded by Hedgecock’s remark in the morning that to-day was ‘Swithums.’ The old man is less infirm, I thought, and we talked politics and literature. He told me of two new poets, Symons and Mrs. King. He is satisfied with the way things are going in Ireland, and asked me what I thought of the Pope’s Labour Encyclical. It is, in truth, a rather colourless pronouncement, saying too little.

“_6th Aug._—At Coombe, where I heard from Bertram Currie the history of the Baring financial crisis, and the part he had played in averting its being an absolute crash. The collapse was due to Revelstoke’s having gambled outside the line of his ordinary business. He had had his head turned by the million he had made over the Guinness affair, and he had come to think that everything he touched must turn to gold, and he went on to his ventures in South America, which let him in. The House of Baring would have broken altogether if he, Bertram, had not got the Bank of England to secure its liabilities for a million and taken half a million himself and persuaded Lord Rothschild as late as six o’clock in the evening to take another. The prospects in South America are bad, as things there do not settle down and Ned [Revelstoke] has only £500 a year settled income. [This was a case that had made an immense sensation in the City. But the House of Baring has happily survived it.]

“_7th August._—Lunched at Kelmscott House when Mrs. Morris took me to see the printing. Morris’s own poems were being struck off, most beautiful they are with their rubrics. The sheet I saw being printed contained the Ballad of John a Wood.”

This also of nearly the same date relates to the Kelmscott Press. “Had supper with Morris and his wife and her sister, Miss Burden, and a Mr. Walker [Emery Walker], who helps in the printing work. Morris was busy drawing a title-page for his ‘Golden Legend’ and there were some sheets of his new volume of poems, which is to be uniform with the volume he is printing for me. He was immensely pleased when I told him that I had read his ‘News from Nowhere,’ and that Anne also had read it. He gave an amusing account of an old house ‘that that fellow Watts (the painter) had been daubing over. But a coat of whitewash,’ he said, ‘would soon set that right.’ I told him in return about George Wyndham’s visit to Swinburne at Putney, a few months ago, when the other Watts, Theodore Watts-Dunton, had insisted on talking politics with him instead of literature, to George’s disgust, and how it had ended in Watts reading out his own poems instead of letting Swinburne read his. Watts, George tells me, keeps Swinburne prisoner, as a keeper keeps a lunatic. He had explained to George that some years ago he had found Swinburne in bed, dying of what is called ‘drunkard’s diarrhœa,’ and that having got him round, he now considers Swinburne as his own property, and treats him like a naughty boy, ‘a case,’ said George, ‘for police interference.’ Morris was greatly amused at this.”

The month of September saw me in Scotland for a fortnight’s grouse shooting at Castle Menzies, which had been rented for the season by my friends the Wagrams, where I had the advantage of meeting a number of French royalists who were staying there to pay their court to the Comte de Paris, who rented a moor close by, the Broglies, the Jaucourts, and the Hautpouls, as well as Count Mensdorff, afterwards Austrian Ambassador in London. With these I made friends, and also had more than one opportunity of seeing the Comte and Comtesse de Paris and their beautiful daughter, Princess Hélène, who was at one time so nearly marrying the heir to our own English throne, and who afterwards married the Duke of Aosta (I had already met her once before at the Wagrams’). My diary describes the life led by these most worthy Pretenders to the throne of France in their summer Highland home thus:

“_13th Sept. Sunday._—We drove over to Loch Kinnaird, a lovely place in a fir wood high up on the moors. The house is a wooden one without any kind of pretension. The inside of varnished deal, no upper story, no garden, and no attempt at beautifying inside or out. There we found the Comte de Paris, a lean, bent, grisly-bearded man, on the wrong side of middle age, undistinguished in appearance or manner, though courteous and amiable, difficult to recognize as the descendant of French kings or the representative of divine right in the world. His Queen, a masculine, plain woman.

“With them, the flower of their wilderness, Princesse Hélène de France et de Navarre, a tall, very tall, slight girl of immense charm and distinction, whom I taught to play lawn tennis at Castle Menzies three years ago. She remembered it well and was very nice to me in her greeting. She poured out tea for us, and we all sat down to it, a regular meal in the dining-room. The little conversation I had with the Comte de Paris was only about shooting.” I saw them again on the 15th, when they came to Castle Menzies for a great _chasse_ of blue hares on Shehallion. “It was close opposite Shehallion on the tops of the hills, and to these the hares were driven, poor timorous beasts of the blue mountain kind. We got four hundred of them, a terrible massacre. The party consisted of the Comte and Comtesse de Paris, with three French gentlemen of their suite, of Wagram, the Prince de Broglie, Lord Crawford and his son Balcarres, Algy Grosvenor, Godfrey Webb, Needham, and me. The Comtesse de Paris shoots well. I walked the last two miles across the moor with her and saw her kill a brace of strong flying driven grouse in excellent style. She marches over the heather like a grenadier, shouts at the beaters, and jokes in rough country fashion with those near her. The Comte is equally without pretence. They are addressed as Monseigneur and Madame—sometimes, but rarely, as Altesse—their conversation a long sequence of royal commonplace. They are full of _bonhomie_. Coming to the high road on our way home a gipsy woman stopped the Count, and he gave her two sixpences.

“_20th Sept._—At 1, came the Comte and Comtesse de Paris, and the little Princess looking lovely in a hat with pink flowers. I was put next her at luncheon, and we talked all the time, Balcarres being on her right hand. We talked about the East, and she promised to come to Egypt and that I should be her dragoman and take her to Mount Sinai. She told me about her life at home at Stowe, where she rides and hunts with the Duke of Grafton’s hounds, and at Loch Kinnaird where she walks about the hills alone each summer with her dogs. I asked her, ‘Have you no governess with you?’ ‘I should like to see the governess,’ she said, ‘who would undertake to look after me.’ And she looked proudly out of her blue eyes. In Spain, where they spend part of their winters near Seville, they hunt wild camels on horseback. We talked, too, about her brother, the Duc d’Orléans’ imprisonment at Paris, and mine in Ireland.”

On my way back south I paid a first visit to the Glen, where most of the Tennant family were assembled, though Margot was away. Lucy and Charty, however, were there, and I made great friends with old Lady Tennant, a quiet little old lady, very well dressed, active and alert, whom I found exceedingly pleasant and conversable, with a heart overflowing with kindness. She showed me a book about Souls, which gives diagrams of the various kinds of souls, the surface soul, the deep soul, and the mixed soul, half-clever, half-childish (the book had something to do, I think, with the name given to the set of which her daughters were such notable members).

“Talking about Gladstone, she tells me that Gladstone’s grandfather lived in this neighbourhood at Peebles. He was a baker, spelling his name Gladstanes, but known locally as ‘licht bap,’ on account of his selling his bread at false weight, ‘bap’ being the name of a kind of loaf. After luncheon we all drove to Traquhair, an interesting old house much fallen into decay, the present owner taking no interest in it. We were shown over the rooms by his brother, who might have been one of Scott’s Osbaldistones. The family pedigrees were lying littered round the library, hardly legible for damp.

“_30th Sept._—To Kelmscott Manor, to wish the Morrises good-bye for the winter. It was very perfect weather and we did our gudgeon fishing and took our walks as usual there. Jenny is better than she has been for several years. Her devotion to her father is most touching and his to her. Morris in high feather. He read us out several of his poems of his best, including ‘The Haystack in the Floods,’ but his reading is without the graces of elocution. He did it as if he were throwing a bone to a dog, at the end of each piece breaking off with ‘There, that’s it,’ as much as to say, ‘You may take it or leave it, as you please.’ He is to lecture on art at Birmingham on Friday. Politically he is in much the same position as I am. He has found his Socialism impossible and uncongenial, and has thrown it wholly up for art and poetry, his earlier loves. I fancy I may have influenced him in this.”

The early autumn saw me once more in Paris, where the unrest of the military party which had given Boulanger his chance two years before, a chance which he had failed to take, had given place to apathy. “Poor Boulanger,” I write, 1st October, “has blown his brains out over the grave of Madame Bonnemain. Politically he was already defunct, and this is a graceful and dramatic exit”; and a week later, “Parnell is dead.”

Here I spent my time, as usual, mostly at the Embassy, where Lady Salisbury was staying with her daughter, Lady Gwendolen, and her sister- in-law, Lady Galloway, both very charming women. Lady Salisbury, too, was clever with much dry wit. I find the following in my journal: “I sat between Lady Salisbury and Lady Galloway to-night at dinner, and during it she told us a story of a visit she had paid long ago to old Lady Palmerston, and how Lady Palmerston had said to her, _à propos_ of the bondage of social observances: ‘My dear you will some day be in my position (of Prime Minister’s wife), and when you are I advise you to pay no visits at all.’ ‘So I never pay any,’ she said, ‘except to the Foreign Ambassadresses. Of course,’ she added, ‘I don’t include those of the South American Republics or any others of the people who live up trees.’”

The question of the evacuation of Egypt was being a good deal discussed at that time in Paris, as the French Government, suspecting Lord Salisbury of the intention, he in fact had, of making the Occupation there more permanent, was beginning to give trouble, and I found both Lytton and Egerton, first Secretary of the Embassy, an old friend of mine, who did much of the work of the Embassy, and had been acting as Chargé d’Affaires during Lytton’s absence on leave during the summer, anxious to hear what I had to say on the subject, and I discussed it thoroughly with both. I had learned from my Egyptian friend, Sanua, who had just been at Constantinople and had had an interview with Sultan Abdul Hamid, that the Sultan had declared positively to him that he would take action to enforce the evacuation. There was a perfect understanding now between the Turkish Government and the French, probably also the Russian Government, who had repented the pressure they had put upon Abdul Hamid to prevent his ratifying the Wolff Convention, and were pressing the Sultan to re-open the question. Lytton, poor fellow, had returned to Paris from a cure he had been taking in England, very seriously ill, and the doctors had enjoined upon him complete idleness, a remedy which would involve his giving up his Embassy, but he was interested in what I told him, and asked me to write him a memorandum on the whole subject of Egypt, and especially that I should discuss it with Egerton. This I did and found Egerton strongly in favour of my views. “To my surprise he told me that he was in favour of evacuating Egypt seeing the pledges that had been given. ‘We have managed,’ he said, ‘to set everybody there against us except that stupid fool the Khedive who counts for nothing,’ and urged me strongly not only to write but to publish my memorandum, if only anonymously in the ‘Times.’” Later (the same day, 27th October) I saw George Curzon who is staying in Paris with Condy Stephens. He, Curzon, of course, talks all the other way, and says the whole Conservative party will oppose evacuation tooth and nail. I breakfasted with him, Oscar Wilde, and Willy Peel, on which occasion Oscar told us he was writing a play in French to be acted in the Français. He is ambitious of being a French Academician. We promised to go to the first representation, George Curzon as Prime Minister. A day or two later, with Lytton’s approval and Egerton’s, I gave my memorandum to Blowitz (the “Times” correspondent), and it appeared in due course in the “Times” without my name, and accompanied with a leading article. Lord Salisbury, however, had already made up his mind, and in a new speech reiterated his intention to remain in Egypt. “Lytton,” I write, 11th November, “is delighted with Lord Salisbury’s boldness in refusing to evacuate. Egerton says it is foolhardy.”[3]

It is worth noting that, if Egerton’s view had prevailed, and our quarrel with France had then been solved on the basis of our evacuating Egypt, it would in all probability have forestalled the mistake made twelve years later of effecting the reconciliation, through the fatal error of basing it on “compensating” France by encouraging her seizure of Morocco. The Entente with France, begun in 1904 by an act of aggression on a harmless neighbour, involved France necessarily in a quarrel with Germany, who had earmarked Morocco as her share of the plunder of North Africa; it revived at Paris the half-forgotten dream of a _guerre de revanche_ for Alsace-Lorraine, and strengthened the war party on both sides the Rhine. England it involved in the Entente with Russia, cemented with the betrayal of a second weak Mohammedan state, Persia, and drove progressive Turkey, in fear of a third betrayal, into an alliance with Kaiser Wilhelm.

I left Paris a few days later for Rome and Cairo. During the fortnight that I had been at the Embassy, Lytton’s condition had rapidly grown worse, and when, on the 13th of November, I was taken in to where he lay in bed to say good-bye, I felt that our farewell might be the last. “Give my love to Dufferin,” were his last words, “when you are at Rome—_that_ he always has—and tell him I am a wreck, but do not mean to make a vacancy yet.” And so we said, God bless you and good-bye. It was less than a fortnight later (25th November, at Fogliano) that a telegram reached me, forwarded through Lord Dufferin at Rome, from Paris, telling me that my friend had died. His death was a loss I can hardly estimate, and to many more than me, for by the public in Paris it was looked on as a State calamity. He had managed to make himself beloved there as no English ambassador had been since Waterloo, and as Dufferin, who, as had been expected, succeeded him, with all his great social gifts was never able to achieve. It was not merely that Lytton was popular, but he was beloved. His death was a loss to the cause of our good understanding with France, and I think to Egypt too, for though too pronounced an Imperialist to wish to see England’s hand over the Nile relaxed, no one could so well have settled the conditions of an evacuation as Lytton could have done had it been so decided. And he placed value on my opinion in the matter.

During the few days I spent at Rome that November I attended a Peace Congress, to which as member of the acting committee of the Arbitration and Peace Society I had been invited, but I was very unfavourably impressed with the Italian tone in regard to international matters where the rights of non-European nationalities were at stake. The Italians, like the French and all the Latin races, seemed to me incapable of grasping the idea, which we in England at any rate admit in theory if seldom in practice, that the nations outside the community of Christian civilization have any rights at all. I did not speak on this occasion, but I left the meeting convinced that the establishment of international peace if it could be secured for Europe would bode no good for Africa or Asia, and that as far as these regions of the world were concerned the old proverb probably held good, “When thieves fall out honest men come by their own.”

From Fogliano we went straight on without returning to Rome, and so by the first boat to Alexandria, reaching Sheykh Obeyd on 7th December, where we spent the rest of the winter.

About the close of the year 1891, I received the following letter from Sir William Harcourt in answer to one of mine from Paris, inclosing a copy of my Paris memorandum. As it is of great importance I give it textually here:

“Malwood, _16th December_ 1891.

“DEAR WILFRID BLUNT,

“I have not written before to thank you for your paper on Egypt, as you sent me at the time no address. I was greatly impressed by the ability and moderation of its views, and the fulness with which the question was discussed in every aspect. I forwarded it to John Morley, who entirely concurred with me, in the high opinion I had formed of its merits.

“The question is, no doubt, one of great complexity and cannot be rushed. At the same time I have never varied in my opinion of the mischief and danger of the continued occupation, as far as England is concerned, and though probably you will not agree with me I regard this as by far the most important consideration. It is quite impossible for the Government to take a high line as to occupation after the Drummond- Wolff negotiations. The whole thing is summed up in a nutshell by Wolff in his concluding despatch, after the ratification by the English Government of the Convention for the Evacuation in 1887, within the space of three years. He says, ‘It has more than once been suggested that England should take permanent possession of Egypt. This would have been a violation of the traditional policy of England, of her good faith to the Sultan, and of public law. In time of peace it would have exposed her to constant jealousy and danger. In time of war, it would have been a weak point, entailing a constant drain on her resources. Her Majesty’s Government have disclaimed all idea of annexing Egypt or of establishing a Protectorate over it.’

“This language was approved by Salisbury, and was a deliberate renewal in the face of Europe of the pledges given in 1881. Salisbury undertook to ‘guarantee the neutralization of Egypt as the mandatory of the other Powers, that duty being regarded as a burden rather than a privilege.’ The great mischief, as you properly point out, is that since that period the policy of Evelyn Baring has been to administer the Government of Egypt in such a manner as to make it constantly less instead of more able to stand by itself, and so to make the task of fulfilling our obligation more rather than less difficult.

“I hope by this time you are enjoying your wild life in the desert. We are raising our rural tribes here, who are rallying round the Mahdi Schnadhorst—but I forgot you have sworn off British Politics, a wise determination to which I advise you to adhere.

“Yrs. sincerely,

“W. V. HARCOURT.”

This is a very important letter, as it indicates doubtless what Mr. Gladstone’s view at the time was, for Sir William Harcourt and he worked together on questions of foreign policy. It is also of importance as showing that John Morley then shared their opinion. It was a combination of Baring, and of Milner, acting under his direction on the London Press, with Rosebery, that prevented an honest solution of the Egyptian question when the Liberals, shortly afterwards, returned to power.