Chapter VII: Asquith at Downing Street (1)

“_9th April_, 1908.

Anne writes from Egypt telling how the Court _hakim_, the Khedive’s chief physician, stopped her the other day to express his gratitude to me for all I had done for the National cause. This I am glad to get, as I have been much in doubt how my ‘Secret History’ had been taken at the Palace.

“_13th April._—The full composition of the new Ministry is announced. Elgin and Portsmouth retire, having both of them somewhat compromised themselves, Elgin by mismanaging South Africa, Portsmouth by a foolish quarrel with one of his country tenants for shooting hares. Winston enters the Cabinet, and Morley becomes Lord Shillyshally.

“_15th April._—A good letter from Brailsford, just back from Egypt. He is rather disappointed with the political organization of the Nationalists and their little hold over the country districts. He calls them terribly urbanized and this is doubtless true, but I believe the same may be said of all movements of the kind, and that to wait till the peasantry of any country is politically educated is to wait till Domesday. He is not yet converted to the English official view, and wants to talk things over with me.

“_16th April._—Asquith’s new Ministry is fully formed, and one is able to judge more or less what the change means. It is certainly retrograde as far as humanitarian views are concerned, and is now as purely Whig Imperialist as it could well be made. The Colonial Office will be run on lines of pure Imperial Federation. We shall see the colonists in South Africa allowed their way with the native blacks. The Zulus will be harried in Natal, and Dinizulu hanged or deported. I do not trust Crewe, who always had a Colonial twist, and we shall see a hack Under-Secretary answering inconvenient questions in the House of Commons. It will be the same at the India Office with Morley removed to the Lords. The Government was bad before, it will be worse now. The bright spot in the situation is Redmond’s declaration against Asquith. It can hardly mean anything else than war with the Whigs, and a strong opposition on imperial questions. Bannerman being a thorough Home Ruler has hitherto been a stumbling block to the Irish, but about Asquith they have no illusions.

“_20th April._—Passing through Horsham to-day I saw on a poster, ‘The Sultan of Turkey defies Italy. Mobilization of the Italian Fleet.’ This looks like a beginning of a new partition of the Ottoman Empire, to the extent of allowing Italy to occupy Tripoli. The reason given in the papers is that the Sultan has refused to allow the Italian Government to have a separate post office in Ottoman territory, an absurd pretext for a war, but Asquith’s is a Rosebery Cabinet and we may expect any violence in the East with its connivance. I suppose the Emperor William has been squared.”

This was the first premonitory thunderclap of what was presently to prove the great storm which, beginning with the aggression by Italy on Turkey, was to involve Eastern Europe in a series of wars, and eventually the whole Western world in the overwhelming catastrophe of 1914. For the moment the storm was averted, as I understand, by the Emperor William _not_ having been squared, and his unwillingness at that time to have the peace of Europe broken. The French Government, however, and our own, can hardly not have been acquiescent in Italy’s ambition of an African Empire. They had already the thought that in this way Italy might be won over and detached from the German-Austrian Alliance. It is significant that the incident here recorded should have synchronized with Campbell Bannerman’s retirement, giving as it did a position of sole authority on foreign affairs to Grey in Downing Street.

“_22nd April._—The Italian Invasion of Tripoli has been staved off by the Emperor William, who has persuaded the Sultan to yield the point about the post office, so the sailing of the fleet is countermanded.

“_23rd April._—I have had staying here Cecil Sharp, the collector of folk songs. I find him an interesting man, with great knowledge of his own particular subject and enlightened views on others. I took him to- day, after lunch, to see old Jupp at Carpenters, and we made him sing his Bristol song and ‘The Fisherman,’ of which last I took down the words.

THE FISHERMAN

As I was a-walking one morning in May

All down by the river side,

There came in a boat a bold Fisherman

A-rowing down on the tide.

“Who are you, you bold fisherman?

And what are you doing here?”

“I am a-fishing for your sweet sake

All on the river so clear.”

He has tied his boat fast to a stump

And to the fair maid he went,

“I have come to kiss your lily white hand

For so it was my intent.”

He has unbuttoned his morning gown

And laid it gay on the ground,

And she has seen a chain of gold

On his body three times round.

She has fallen down on her bended knees

And loud on his mercy called,

“I thought you was a bold fisherman

And I see you are a lord.”

“I will take you home to my father’s house,

And married straight will we be,

And you shall have a bold fisherman

To row you on the sea.”

“Campbell Bannerman is dead, good old man, the last of the Gladstone Liberals of 1880, except Ripon, who is still in the Cabinet under Asquith, but who has given up his leadership of the House of Lords to Crewe. I don’t know that there is much to say about Bannerman except that he was a worthy soul and did his best to carry on the better tradition.

“_26th April._—Winston Churchill has lost his seat at Manchester. It is a bad blow for Asquith, as Winston had just pledged him and the Cabinet to a full Home Rule programme for the next general election, and Redmond had accepted a declaration and had pronounced in Churchill’s favour.

“_30th April._—Chapel Street. Meynell came to dine with me. He is bringing out a new edition of Thompson’s poetry, of which he expects much. I think Thompson is secure of a high position now, not only from the excellence of his workmanship, but because he is unique as a religious poet. I know of no good religious poet since George Herbert, or one who can anyway compare with Thompson, for Newman, with the exception of ‘Lead, kindly light,’ wrote nothing really first rate. His ‘Gerontius’ has been made much of because of its doctrinal character, but as poetry it is poor stuff. Later George Wyndham came to see me and sat talking for a couple of hours, his discourse more of poetry than politics. He recited two love songs he had made, one of them really beautiful, with triple endings, which he called, ‘From the Persian.’

“He was full of his son Percy’s adventures abroad with Bendor, how they had steered a motor boat race at Palermo, and other golden deeds, worthy, he said, of one of Ouida’s heroes. He talks with disgust of politics; it is a glue he will never get free of. He has had George Curzon to dine with him lately, and has persuaded him not to commit himself against Tariff Reform, as his doing so would prevent him taking any leading part in the Tory party should occasion offer.

“Then came Brailsford with more about his experience in Egypt. He rates the Nationalists very low intellectually; Saad Zaghloul and the few disciples of Mohammed Abdu he considers the best, but they have no influence, while Mustapha Kamel’s successors, who have influence, are without force of character or sufficient intelligence to direct the movement. He heard bad accounts of the Khedive, who was gaining influence, but using it for his own purposes. Of the present Cabinet at home he says it is much worse than the last. When Bannerman’s Cabinet was being constructed in November, 1905, Grey at first refused to join it unless Bannerman would go to the House of Lords. This little secret was oddly enough betrayed to the ‘Times’ by Morley and published, but the very same night Grey was persuaded to withdraw his objection on condition he should be allowed his own way absolutely in foreign affairs, and he had ever since been extremely jealous of Bannerman, a jealousy which had accentuated his obstinacy in pursuing imperialist lines. This would now be at an end, and Grey might be by so much the more amenable to the views of his colleagues. It is a thousand pities Bannerman missed his opportunity of getting rid of Grey altogether when it was offered.

“_5th May._—There has been a considerable incident in India, a bomb has been thrown which has killed two Englishwomen out driving in their carriage. There is also a rising on the Afghan frontier. There is talk of sending British reinforcements.

“_11th May._—Newbuildings. Brailsford and his wife have been here for the week end. Mrs. Brailsford is a charming woman, very clever and sympathetic. He is a Fabian. She takes my larger view of things. There is news of a great conspiracy in India, and a great manufacture of bombs with the help of European anarchists. It is being made use of by the reactionaries to get a repeal of the liberty of the native press.

“Churchill, beaten at Manchester, has got back into parliament at Dundee.

“_27th May._—Farid Bey, who arrived in England a few days ago, came to see me. He is, I think, a pretty good man, not first rate, but sensible and honest. He is anxious to see Grey, and I advised him to get at him through Redmond and to refuse seeing any of the understrappers at the Foreign Office in his place. Then if Grey consented to receive him to put to him one question only, ‘Are the English Government honest in their profession of eventual evacuation?’ Unless Grey can give some new public assurance on this head, it is useless discussing details. The latest pronouncement has been Cromer’s, that ‘Egypt cannot be made self- governing under three or four generations,’ let us say never. As long as there is a doubt about this, all Egyptians will be banded together against England. Farid gives much the same account of the Khedive Abbas’s attitude toward the National movement as Mustapha Kamel did. His Highness talks one thing to one man, another to another. He is friends with Gorst and Cassel, who help him to make money.

“_30th May._—Grey has refused to see Farid on the ground that he also refused to see Kamel. Redmond writes to me about it. In it he says: ‘I had an interview with Sir Edward Grey this morning (about his seeing Farid) and he states that when Mustapha Kamel Pasha was over here as the leader of the Nationalist Party he declined to see him, and that under these circumstances he cannot see his way to see his successor.’ This is marked private.

“Cockerell has got the place of Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge.

“_6th June._—I have been extremely ill for the last three weeks, threatened with I know not what, needing an operation in my throat, which I have refused, preferring to die a natural death. In the afternoon Meynell arrived, having been all the morning with Archbishop Bourne. Bourne, he tells me, was at one time curate to Monsignor Denis at West Grinstead, and knew Newbuildings well in John Pollen’s time, and he remembers having met me at one of the Capuchin festivals at Crawley. His (Bourne’s) position, in regard to Modernism is, contrary to what I imagined, one of disapproving the Papal Encyclical as unnecessary in England and ill-timed, and this, Meynell says, is the general opinion regarding it, so much so that Wilfrid Ward has been able to persuade the Duke of Norfolk to write in that sense to the Pope. The Pope, curiously enough, is believed to be himself not so violent against Modernists as might be supposed from the public pronouncements. Who then is the _causa causans_?

“Meynell has just been to see Francis Thompson’s sister, the nun at Manchester. He describes her as an enthusiastic, impulsive creature, who kissed his hands when she saw him and sat for hours talking about her brother’s early life.

“_7th June._—The crisis of my illness is over. My doctor, when he arrived, remarked cheerfully, ‘Well, we have saved you this time from the surgeon’s hands!’ Nature has operated its own cure, but doctors will be doctors. E. V. Lucas and his wife came for the afternoon, very nice people, he the author of ‘Wisdom while you wait.’ I have spent the afternoon talking pleasantly with Meynell about Thompson’s fame as a poet. Meynell thinks that I too shall be given a permanent place as a poet twenty years hence, but I am doubtful. Certainly I have no such place of any kind now. It will depend very much, I think, upon how things go with the Eastern Nations. If, as I hope, they achieve their independence of Europe, I shall be acknowledged as a forerunner of their cause; if they fail, I shall fail. Anyhow my work in the world is pretty near over. I shall fight and write no more.

“_14th June (Sunday)._—That ‘wretched fellow’ Morley has had a new Press Law passed in India giving power to local authorities to seize printing presses and confiscate without trial where sedition has been published. It was this same John Morley of whom Lytton used so bitterly to complain to me as his most violent attacker while in India, notwithstanding their personal friendship, and on these very points, if I remember rightly, of his Afghan campaign and his Press Law, which is identical with this of Morley’s to-day. Morley is adopting all the methods used by Russia in its imperial dealings.

“_21st June._—An odd visit this afternoon from a stranger (sent to me by Cockerell), Lord Osborne Beauclerk, who had bicycled from London. He is a pleasant young man who has travelled much in Asia, and has ideas about horses, poetry and ethnology. He professed himself in a great hurry as it was late and he wanted to get on to Wakehurst for dinner, so he put me at once through a number of questions on all these subjects. It was like being interviewed for the Press. I showed him the stallions and gave him a copy of the ‘Golden Odes.’ He says he will come again.” [This was the beginning of a pleasant and very constant friendship.]

“_27th June._—Brailsford and his wife are here. A good book has been sent me from America called ‘Egypt and its Betrayal,’ by one Farman, who was Consul General for America in Egypt in Ismaïl’s time and till after the bombardment. It quite corroborates my account of the doings of the time. Things are going badly in Egypt. They have been playing the fool and quarrelling with the Copts. The Khedive has been in London the last few days, come over, Mark Napier tells me, to raise money on mortgage.

“Things in Persia also look badly. The Shah with the help of some Russian officers lent him by the Russian Government, who have drilled him a few hundred Cossacks, has effected a reactionary _coup d’état_ at Teheran, breaking up the Mejliss, slaughtering the people and hanging newspaper editors. This is the first fruits of Grey’s treaty with Russia and the King’s visit to the Czar. Brailsford’s opinion of Grey is that it is more stupidity and ignorance with him than ill will. He thinks he really believes in Russian promises. All the diplomacy is done by Hardinge and the King, while Grey is their mouthpiece in the House of Commons, having a fine presence and an impressive manner with a wonderfully fine speaking voice. In Russia, in Persia, in Egypt, and in India, the reaction is in full swing. No one will listen to anything but force in dealing with the National movements. Something of the same kind about Hardinge and the King was told me by Beauclerk who again paid me a flying visit. He arrived from Wakehurst where Frank Lascelles is staying, and brought me messages from him. Lascelles is out of favour now with the King, as being too German in his sentiments. He wanted to have the Paris Embassy, but the King refused on the ground that he was not married, so he is to retire. They hold him responsible for the Kaiser Wilhelm’s unfriendly attitude. Wilhelm told him lately that he was sick of England and everything to do with it.

“My dear old friend Evelyn is dead at the age of eighty-six. I had been intending to drive over to Wotton to see him as soon as ever I was well enough, as he had asked for me to come some three months ago. He has been my political ally now for twenty-five years, latterly my only ally, we two being the last of the Tory Home Rulers and anti-Imperialists. With certain defects of temper which led him into quarrels with his neighbours, he was the most generous of men, and to me always staunch and true. I remember him first fifty years ago, a shy young man, already M.P. for Surrey, but submitting to be patronized in his bullying way, by my guardian old Henry Currie, at West Horsley. Our friendship came on later in connection with Egypt and Ireland. His domestic life was not altogether happy, his Irish wife, a Chichester, having strong Orange proclivities, which worried him much, while a certain obstinacy of character caused him trouble in his parish, and a long feud with the parson, against whom he waged persistent war through a local newspaper carried on for twenty years. To me his death is a great loss. At one time he had named me guardian of his son John in his will, but John is now of age and succeeds him at Wotton, we all hope worthily.

“_29th June._—Brailsford tells me of a dinner given lately by Maurice Baring to his uncle, Cromer, at which were also Bernard Shaw, J. M. Robertson, Belloc, and other one or two Radicals, this doubtless to conciliate Shaw in connection with Denshawai. I shall be curious to hear the result. Cromer has always been a past master in dealing with the press.

“_1st July._—Edward Malet is dead, at the age of seventy, having been long ailing. The papers give him a fair meed of praise. He and Colvin are now both dead within a few months of each other, and all the chief actors in the Egyptian tragedy of 1882 are gone.

“_11th July._—Rothstein writes about the difficulty of getting assistance from the Radicals in Parliament on Egyptian affairs. I have answered that I consider it does not matter. It is hopeless to attempt the conversion of Radicals more than Tory opinion. Nobody in England wishes for Egypt’s independence, and the issue does not depend upon English, but on other influences in East and West. What we have to do is to go on agitating and opposing as they do in Ireland.

“_13th July._—Percy Wyndham, who has been staying here, went away. At breakfast he gave me some interesting particulars about his family history which I had asked him for. He tells me as to his grandfather, Lord Egremont, and his marriage, that his (Percy’s) grandmother was the daughter of a certain Reverend Iliffe, a beneficed clergyman of Surrey, Vicar of Bramley, I think, who made her over to him when quite young. She was very beautiful and very innocent. Lord Egremont practically bought her of her father, and for some years they lived together very happily. There were three sons of the union, George, Hugh, and Charles, and two daughters, Lady Burrell, a very pretty woman, and Mrs. King. Lady Munster was by another woman, a celebrated _demi-mondaine_, Mrs. Fox. George, the eldest son by Miss Iliffe, was born in 1787. Later Lord Egremont married her and had a daughter, Lady Elizabeth Wyndham, but no son. Then they quarrelled, as she found out he was unfaithful to her, and there was a legal separation, and she lived alone for many years at Fulham in the house now the Bishop of London’s Palace. She was a well educated woman and affected science as her hobby to the extent that Lord Egremont got the Royal Society to give her a medal for some pamphlet she had written. Her house at Fulham was much frequented by scientific people. She was quite respectable in every way except her connection with Lord Egremont which at the time she began it she probably did not understand the meaning of. ‘Her subsequent marriage with him,’ Percy said, ‘would, if it had been made in Scotland, have legalized us all.’ When Lord Egremont died nobody knew how he would leave his property and a great number were disappointed. His nephew, who succeeded him as Lord Egremont, he did not like and used to laugh at. He, the nephew, got the Orchard Wyndham property and the property at Dinton, and he began to build an enormous house intended to rival Petworth, but he never finished it, and it is now a ruin. Hugh got Cockermouth and the Cumberland property which he never knew how to manage, getting no more than £5,000 a year from it when it was worth £30,000, and afterwards, when it reverted to Petworth, became worth perhaps £100,000. Charles got Rogate, and George Petworth and the rest. Lord Egremont had more confidence in George than in the others, and rightly. The persons most disappointed by his will were the Herberts, his sister having married one of the Carnarvon Herberts. When the will had been read they ordered their carriages and went off. This at the outset embittered Percy’s father towards these relations. When the quarrel between Lord Egremont and his lady occurred, Percy’s father (he was then thirteen) had been told to leave off writing to her, and having disobeyed was flogged by his father—all this is interesting and most of it new to me. Some of the Iliffe family spell their name Ayliffe. Percy is of opinion that his grandfather’s political wisdom and ability have been somewhat overrated. He, through life, avoided taking part in public affairs or joining a party, and so his talents were never put to the proof. He was a very generous dealer with his wealth, maintaining a number of needy hangers- on at Petworth who had almost permanent lodging and board in the house, and painters and other artists innumerable.

“_14th July._—Terence Bourke came for the day, he has bought a farm called Pekes, in East Sussex, and intends to settle there, though without selling his property at Bizerta. Things in Tunis, he tells me, are no longer so interesting as they were for him, the Anglo-French Entente having smoothed down disputes between French and English, and the project of making Bizerta a naval seaport and arsenal has been abandoned. The country is making material progress, the agricultural part, though in the towns the position of the Moslems has not improved. There is a small philo-Arab section of French opinion, but the Moslems are still without anything like a free press, or other means of protesting against injustice.

“_25th July._—For a week past there has been talk in the papers of a military revolt in Macedonia, and to-day the great news is published of the Sultan’s having dismissed his Grand Vizier, Farid Pasha, recalling Kiamil Pasha and Said Pasha Kutshuk, and summoned a Parliament under Midhat’s constitution. This is, indeed, good news, only I hope the revolution will not leave Abdul Hamid on the throne, or he will play them false again, as he did in 1879.

“I have been asked to a dinner given by Ismaïl Pasha Abaza and other members of the Egyptian Legislative Council who are in London. Tilak, the head of the Indian revolutionary party in India has just been sentenced to six months’ deportation to the Andaman Islands for a ‘seditious’ article in his newspaper, the ‘Kesari’ of Bombay. Morley is playing the high old Russian game there, and there is not a man in the House of Commons to ask a question about it. It is sickening.

“Belloc has just published a new book, ‘Clutterbuck’s Election,’ very amusing.

“_27th July._—Things are going splendidly at Constantinople. There has been universal rejoicing all over Turkey, Moslem and Christian and Jew embracing one another, just as I remember it at Cairo in 1881 when the Constitution was proclaimed there. The revolution has occurred in the very nick of time, for it is pretty clear that the Anglo-Russian agreement about Macedonia come to by the King at Reval was intended as a first step towards the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. This will now be prevented indefinitely; it would also immensely strengthen the demand for a restoration of the Constitution in Egypt.

“_30th July._—Hyndman writes asking me to help financially in a campaign he proposed to make in favour of Tilak and other imprisoned Indian patriots. This in answer to a letter of mine. Ismaïl Abaza’s deputation of Egyptian Legislative Councillors is, I think, a good move, though repudiated by Farid Bey. Abaza succeeded in getting an interview with Grey, though what passed at it has not been published. The revolution at Constantinople will have greatly strengthened his hands.

“_1st Aug._—The young swallows in the bathroom have flown, but they still come back to their nest at night. It has been a great pleasure watching them, the old swallows having come in and out of the room by the window while I was in the bath quite undisturbed though the nest was just above it, built on a curtain rod. There were four young ones hatched and all have flown.

“_4th Aug._—Belloc who was here to-day tells me that it has been communicated to him in confidence that Grey has said that Egypt shall have a Constitution granted to her in two years’ time. If true, and I think it likely in view of events in Turkey, it is most important.

“_5th Aug._—A girl of seventeen, a daughter of Merrick Burrell’s wood- reeve, was run over and killed by a motor at Buck Barn cross roads, and to-day I went to the inquest, the first one I have ever attended. It took place on the spot where the thing happened, a dangerous place, but not for a careful driver. At the cross roads I found a score of local people, neighbouring farmers and the like, collected, with the parish policeman, who was showing the exact spot where the collision took place with the marks of the girl’s blood still visible on the road. The traces showed that the girl had been dragged thirty-two feet by the motor, which had only been brought to a stand after eighty-two feet. While we were examining the coroner drove up, and then in a smart motor the three young men who had caused the death, and we all went into the barn close by, where the inquest was held.

“The scene inside when the court assembled was a curious one. It was a good old threshing floor with oak timbers, and on each side of the wide floor sat the twelve jurymen on forms, the coroner and one or two others at the far end of the table. The jurors were all local people, farmers and labourers, with the Shipley parson, Sir Merrick’s coachman, and Captain Turner, a close neighbour. There was something mediæval about the thing, a fine survival from the days of the Heptarchy, which seemed very real when the coroner explained that we were assembled under authority of the King to inquire into the cause of the death of one of his Majesty’s lieges, to wit, Mabel Mary Denman of this parish. Then the jury having been sworn, they were instructed to cross the road and view the corpse on which they were sitting, and I went to the cottage with them where the girl’s body lay. Our proceedings were all the more impressive from the intermittent roar of holiday motors passing in quick succession outside along the Worthing road, joy-riders, without slackening of speed or knowledge of or care for what had happened, or was happening, light-hearted Londoner folk concerned with nothing but their own pleasure and the thought of in how few minutes they could make the run from one point to another of their outing to Worthing.

“Inside the cottage the dead girl, a great, strong, healthy country girl, lay there in her coffin, looking hardly dead, for the brown of the summer sun in the hayfields was on her face, only there were two great wounds on the forehead, and others on cheek and chin, where the motor had dragged her, face downwards, on the road.

“On our return to the barn the proceedings were resumed, the first witness, the girl’s brother, a young fellow of eighteen, not unlike her, a tall, well-shaped, ruddy country boy, with a straightforward, honest face. He told very simply how he and his brother had been on their bicycles to West Grinstead station; how, coming back, he had met his sister, who had been sent to her father in the field to carry him his dinner, how she had asked for a ride back to their home half a mile away, how he had taken her on the step behind him, her little sister riding with the brother. It was only a few hundred yards to the cross roads. Arrived there, he had looked up the Horsham road and had seen a motor coming, but as it was thirty yards away and he was already on his own road, he held on his course, but the motor neither slackened speed nor turned aside and before he could get clear across it caught them. All was over in an instant. Another rustic witness corroborated the account, and the police gave details of measurements and distances, and the doctor who had found the girl lying by the roadside bleeding from head and mouth, with other injuries. She never recovered consciousness. I was allowed by the coroner to put several questions, for the motorist had pretended that the girl had fallen off, but both eye-witnesses were clear against this. Such was the main evidence. The defendant, a young bank clerk from Balham, who had been driving the motor, was a respectable youth in every way, but short-sighted, and wearing spectacles. What came out was that if he had kept to the near side instead of along the crown of the road there would have been no accident, for the road was wide and there was ample room, but he had gone on without thought, it being a good piece of the road for speed, slightly downhill, keeping along the crown, and chancing what might be in front. The jury, I am thankful to say, returned a verdict of manslaughter. The thing made me angry, and I intended, if there was no sufficient verdict, to call an indignation meeting in the parish. It will now, however, come before the Horsham magistrates, and at the Assizes.

[N.B.—The motorist eventually got two months. I interested myself for a while in these motor cases, and I think was instrumental in checking the joy-riding. It seemed to me an invasion of the enemy in our peaceful Sussex weald.]

“_7th Aug._—Chapel Street. To London to see Hudson, who had written to me that he was hopelessly ill. It was a pathetic letter, complaining that he was a man without a creed, unlike me, he said, who had the advantage of being a Catholic. It had been written in answer to one I had sent him about his new book on Cornwall, which is a very good one. But when I arrived at his house in the extreme west of London I found he had gone out. [This was the well-known writer of many admirable books, mostly on birds and on his early life in South America.]

Meynell, who dined with me to-night, professes to know what the King thinks about the danger of a war with Germany, and what the Kaiser Wilhelm’s plan is. Wilhelm, as soon as he is ready for it, will throw a _corps d’armée_ or two into England, making proclamation that he has come, not as an enemy to the King, but as grandson of Queen Victoria, to deliver him from the socialistic gang which is ruining the country. He will then in conjunction with the King dissolve parliament, and re- establish the King’s autocratic rule as feudatory of the German Empire. Such is the programme, and the King believes in it as true.

“_10th Aug._—Professor Browne has asked my advice about Persia, he being in despair at the counter-revolution there. I have written advising that he should go to Constantinople, and get the new Turkish Government to take the Persian Constitutionalists by the hand, and bring about an end of the Sunni-Shia feud. I am advising Farid to make common cause with the revolution at Constantinople. Belloc repeats that Grey has privately promised Egypt shall have a Constitution in two years’ time.

“_14th Aug._—Blanche Hozier writes from Blenheim that her daughter Clementine is to marry Winston Churchill. She says of him, ‘yesterday, he came to London to ask my consent, and we all three came on here. Winston and I spoke of you and of your great friendship with his father. He is so like Lord Randolph, he has some of his faults, and all his qualities. He is gentle and tender, and affectionate to those he loves, much hated by those who have not come under his personal charm.’ It is a good marriage for both of them, for Clementine is pretty, clever, and altogether charming, while Winston is what the world knows him, and a good fellow to boot.”

I spent my birthday of sixty-eight as usual at Clouds, where I met, amongst others, the Duchess of Wellington with her delightful daughter Lady Eileen Wellesley, who is clever in the way young ladies are clever nowadays, with a great knowledge of poetry and literature, besides being extremely pretty. She read aloud Swinburne to us in a peculiarly sweet voice, and I followed with Mrs. Browning’s “Gods of Hellas,” a very favourite piece with me.

“_20th Aug._—At Clouds. George arrived in the afternoon from Elbarrow. With him Shelah, Duchess of Westminster. They had been at the manœuvres all the morning, had then motored over here, some thirty miles, stopped an hour for tea, and were to motor back, and go out to dinner. This is a good example of the life at high pressure of our ladies of fashion. She has with her in camp, a lady’s maid, a footman, a chauffeur, and a cook. The Duke in the meanwhile is away motoring in Ireland with another chauffeur, another cook, and more servants, besides a motor boat, the one he races with. The life of both of them is a perpetual gallop. This sort of society cannot last, it will end in Bedlam.

“_22nd Aug._—To-day old Kipling, Rudyard’s father, came to dinner, and I had a long talk with him about India. I wanted to find out from him, who is a typical Anglo-Indian, what remedy he would apply to the present condition of things. Like all the rest, however, he has no remedy to propose beyond ‘severe repression’ for the time being, though he does not pretend that this will cure the disease. He puts down as its causes: (1) The Japanese victories, (2) Education, and (3) Official lack of time to be polite; these are the common explanations, but for none of them has he a remedy. The Japanese victories are a fact not to be denied, the education given cannot be withdrawn, the lack of race sympathy cannot be mended. He admits the necessity of a new policy, but can suggest none.

“Looking over old letters from Burne-Jones to Madeline I was glad to find one from Rottingdean, dated 27 December 1882. ‘Thank Mr. Wyndham for sending me a poem, by Wilfrid Blunt, about the Egyptian crime. Of course I heartily agree with it, but admired it, too, and felt it in parts a real poem.’ This was the ‘Wind and the Whirlwind.’

“To-day Percy read out to us an act of one of Bernard Shaw’s plays. He reads very well, having an excellent voice, and some skill in dealing with dialects.

“_30th Aug. (Sunday)._—I have been reading Father Tyrrell’s new book, ‘Mediævalism.’ The reasoning of it is forcible, but the tone petulant and undignified; it takes that most difficult of all forms, an open letter addressed to Cardinal Mercier in answer to a Pastoral issued by him to his Belgian Diocese against Modernism. Mercier’s Pastoral, though severe, is not uncharitable, and speaks of Tyrrell politely, even in a friendly tone, and should have been replied to if at all in the same polite spirit, but Tyrrell is needlessly aggressive. Thus, while scoring in argument, he loses in effect, but the truth is both he and the Cardinal are fighting a battle which neither side can possibly win, and where the plain unbeliever will remain the _tertium gaudens_. It is inconceivable that the uncompromising attitude of what Tyrrell calls Mediævalism, can maintain itself for ever against the logic of science, and it is equally inconceivable that scientific people will go on trying to believe in a divine revelation on Church lines. In his heart Father Tyrrell has already lost faith in it, and must be driven into open rejection of _Roman_ Catholicism just as Dollinger was, indeed much farther than Dollinger, for Tyrrell is logically a materialist, no less than I am; however, the book interests me extremely.

“_31st Aug._—Princess Hélène writes telling of her travels in Somaliland, where she has shot a rhinoceros. She says: ‘Mon voyage m’a fait un bien énorme, je n’ai qu’un rêve, retourner dans ces pays là. Plus je vis, plus j’ai en horreur ce qu’on appelle la civilisation qui n’est que corruption et méchanceté humaine. Si je n’avais pas un mari et des enfants j’irai m’établir là-bas.’

“_1st Sept._—Mohammed Bedr, Egyptian President of the Islamic Society of Edinburgh, came here (Newbuildings) on his way to Egypt. He is a very superior young man, a disciple of Mohammed Abdu, and a strong Nationalist. I asked him the truth about the Mohammedan attitude in India, and he assured me that though certain leaders like Husseyn Bilgrami and the Agha Khan supported the British régime, the great mass of Indian Mohammedans were in sympathy with the Hindoo Nationalists. He believes now in the revival of Asia, and the maintenance of its independence against Europe. He asked my opinion about the prospects of Constitutionalism in Egypt. I told him the thing to aim at was not so much _legislative_ power as the right of the Chamber to control the _executive_, that is to say that the choice of a Ministry should rest with them and not with the Khedive. Unless they obtained this right, the other would be useless, and the Khedive will at any moment be able to revoke the Constitution, with the aid of an army officered by foreigners. He asked what should be their plan of action? I said, ‘You must get together a society of young men of sufficient means to be independent of Government employment, and send them round to the country towns and large villages to give lectures, and instruct the fellahin in the duty of patriotism. When you have accomplished this you will be ready at any time to take advantage of circumstances to demonstrate effectively against the British Occupation. This had been done in Ireland, where the strength of Nationalism had been found in the peasantry through a propaganda of this kind. He is himself, he said, member of a wealthy landowning family in the Sherkieh Province, and would try what could be done.

“_4th Sept._—Eddy Hamilton is dead. This would have meant a great deal to me twenty-five years ago, but he has long been practically defunct, paralysed, and mentally decrepit. Sackville also has dropped out at the ripe age of eighty-one, a thoroughly good fellow, with whom I was never intimate, but always friends. He had a hale old age, a quiet, good man, whom I should regret more were I not myself among the dead.

“_7th Sept._—E. V. Lucas and his wife were here to-day with Dr. Philpot, and Belloc in the afternoon. Lucas tells me that Harmsworth now controls the whole policy and writing of the ‘Times.’ A copy of the ‘Times’ is annotated by him, with remarks, every morning. His sole object now is to restore its character for respectability. This was just what I recommended six months and more ago, when Eddy Tennant was interested in it.

“_11th Sept._—The Poet Laureate (Alfred Austin) arrived from Swinford to-day, and we have had much talk about politics and religion. He is sensible enough when one gets him alone. We discussed Modernism and the Eucharistic Congress, his position towards the Church being much the same as mine. He has never renounced Catholicism, he says, though he does not believe in any religion, but he has leanings once more towards it now he is getting old. For me, as I get older I care less. Austin is seventy-five. We first met about the year ’58, or it may be a little later, when he was reading law in London. A little cock sparrow of a man, he was already with an ambition of becoming Poet Laureate; it is astonishing he should have won to it. His uncle left him some money, enough to live upon, and he abandoned the Law after making once the Northern Circuit. Then he travelled in Italy, became interested in Garibaldi, and married in 1865. In 1870, being at Berlin during the war, the ‘Standard’ took him on as its correspondent, and he followed the German army to Versailles as such. He had a chance interview with Bismarck which made his journalistic fortune, and from that time was kept on as leader writer on the paper for its foreign affairs. This brought him into connection with Lord Salisbury who eventually made him Laureate. So are poets made, _fit non nascitur_, but he takes himself very seriously now, attributes Bismarck’s confidences to a poem of his the great man had read in praise of Prussia, and Salisbury’s choice of him to his acknowledged position at the head of English literature.

“_12th Sept._—To London for the Winston-Clementine wedding. It was quite a popular demonstration. Lord Hugh Cecil Winston’s best man, and the great crowd of relations, not only the Church [St. Margaret’s] full, but all Victoria Street, though that may have partly been for the Eucharistic Congress which began to-day. I went up in the train with Belloc who was to speak at the Congress. At St. Margaret’s I arrived late when all the seats were taken, but Blanche Hozier found me one in the family pew, where I sat between her sister, Maud White, and Hugo Wemyss, others in the pew being Lady Airlie, old Maud Stanley and Lady Grove. Little Nellie bridesmaid. The bride was pale, as was the bridegroom. He has gained in appearance since I saw him last, and has a powerful if ugly face. Winston’s responses were clearly made in a pleasant voice, Clementine’s inaudible.

“_15th Sept._—The King has sent a telegram to the Sultan congratulating him on having appointed Kiamil Pasha his Grand Vizier, and predicting that he will obtain ‘the veneration of future ages.’ This is meant evidently for Indian consumption, an astute move. [Less astute, however, in the sequel, as will be seen, for it bound English diplomacy to the fortunes of Kiamil for the eventual ruin of our influence at Constantinople.]

“_24th Sept._—The first two of my articles on ‘The New Situation in Egypt’ are printed in the ‘Manchester Guardian,’ and the third is promised for to-morrow. The moment is a propitious one, for the King is holding a kind of Council about Egypt at Balmoral, having with him Gorst, Wingate, and Slatin, with Asquith; Cromer being conspicuously absent. This really looks a new policy of some kind, and a policy favourable to Egyptian hopes.

“_25th Sept._—The Poet Laureate has been here again, very pompous. He is good enough to approve my Egyptian articles, ‘every line of them,’ and offers to forward them to Grey with a letter to that effect. I said it was very good of him, but I hoped he would not say I had asked him to do so. His patronage is not likely to be much good to me at the Foreign Office.

“_27th Sept._—Meynell has arrived, and our talk has turned on Francis Thompson on whom the Poet Laureate has been absurd in his pronouncement. Austin’s great object now, Meynell tells me, is to get Wilfrid Ward to write an article about him in the ‘Dublin Review.’ He has confided to Meynell that he has been sounded as to his willingness to be given a title (we suppose a knighthood), but that he has answered that the only title he aspires to is ‘one that would give him the right to address his peers in parliament.’ He may whistle for that.

“There is a complication in Turkey, the Bulgarian Government having seized the Orient railroad. This may lead to war, but all depends on whether Bulgaria is backed by Austria or by Russia. It is curious how the situation of 1876 is being reproduced, and also the situation which was so near occurring in 1885. The Bellocs dined with us, to the discomfiture of the Poet Laureate, to whom Belloc paid scant deference, and whom he quite extinguished in talk.

“_28th Sept._—They are all gone at last, I am glad to say, and ‘silence like a poultice came to heal the wounds of sound,’ for we have had a terribly noisy time.

“Oliver Howard has died, of fever, in Nigeria. What a gratuitous mischance. There was no call whatever for him to go to these malignant countries, no necessity of money or his profession, only a perverse desire for that worst madness which possesses young Englishmen, the sport of arbitrary power in wild countries, with the occasional chance of shooting black men—this is what attracted him.

“_10th Oct._—I have been laid up all the week by a feverish attack while great events have been taking place in the world.

“On Tuesday Bulgaria declared itself an independent kingdom; on Wednesday Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina; on Thursday Crete annexed itself to Greece; and on Friday came news of Albania having declared its independence. The fat is, therefore, very much in the fire. The European situation, which was very difficult to understand, has gradually become clearer. There has most undoubtedly been a plot, instigated I imagine by Kaiser Wilhelm, between Austria, Germany, and Italy, having for its object to bring about the overthrow of the Constitutional party at Constantinople, perhaps a partition of Turkey. What puzzles me is the attitude of Russia in the affair. As things now appear, she is standing with England and France as the upholders of Constitutional Turkey. It is probably in consequence of some agreement of alliance between the three Powers, England, France, and Russia, against Germany, initiated by our King at Reval last summer, suggested by the powerlessness of Russia to advance on Constantinople at present. What probably will happen is that a conference will be proposed which will come to nothing. Then either there will be an acceptance of the _fait accompli_, public opinion in England having got tired of the thing, or there will be a war of coercion. It is clear in all this that if our Government is to take up the high moral line of respect for treaties and declarations, and for the letter of international law, it cannot refuse any longer to keep public faith about Egypt. It will be too absurd, if having strained at the Bosnian gnat it declines to disgorge the Egyptian camel.”

This diagnosis of the situation, though not quite accurate, is near the truth. The Balkan conspiracy against Turkey at that moment in which Bulgaria took the lead was undoubtedly encouraged by Austria, which viewed with disfavour the prospect of regeneration for the Ottoman Empire opened by the revolution at Constantinople, which saw in it, should it succeed, a permanent obstacle to its _Drang nach Osten_, while Kaiser Wilhelm still regarded the Sultan Abdul Hamid as his friend and the Constitutionalists as unfriendly to Germany. At the outset of the Turkish revolution public opinion in England had expressed itself strongly in favour of the Constitutionalists, and to the extent that Grey and our Foreign Office had been carried off their legs and obliged unwillingly to a display of sympathy which found its expression in the King’s telegram to the Sultan congratulating him on the event, and having appointed Kiamil Pasha his Grand Vizier. Kiamil had long been considered a friend to England and England’s Egyptian policy. He had been the Khedive Tewfik’s tutor at one time, and had approved of the English intervention in Tewfik’s favour at the time of Arabi. For the moment, therefore, the new régime at Constantinople was regarded as a triumph over Austrian and German influence. The friendly feeling, however, did not last long, as England was already bound in the chains of the Franco-Russian Entente, and Russia was at least as opposed to the regeneration of Turkey as was Austria. The situation resulted in an attitude of vacillation and insincerity on the part of our diplomacy, which led to a series of betrayals of the Turkish Government by Grey, as will be seen later. What is a quite correct appreciation of the situation here is that which is said of the agreement come to between England, France, and Russia at Reval, which developed into a coalition between these Powers against the Central Empires, and which was interpreted in Germany as a design of “hemming in,” which in fact it was, proved the cause of the Great European War, six years later.

“_11th Oct._—Father Tyrrell has sent me a wild letter in which, after speaking about Thompson’s poetry, he says _à propos_ of the doings in Bosnia and Bulgaria, ‘Will you join me in a friendly visit to the Emperor Francis Joseph, taking in the Czar and the Kaiser on our way home? I feel it is time to _do_ something instead of fizzling like a spent crab. The political rascalities of the last few days has upset my liver.’

“_12th Oct._—I have finished Nevinson’s book about India. It is very well written and interests me greatly, his experiences having a close resemblance to my own of twenty-five years ago. It is disheartening that the Indian reformers should have made so little way since then, for they are hardly any further advanced. Nevinson does not go far enough for me, perhaps he dares not.

“It being a lovely morning I drove over to Storrington and found Father Tyrrell in the annex to Mulberry House, busy, he told me, with a philosopho-theological work of some encyclopædic kind for a publisher. His study is a dark little ground-floor room, and we went out into the sunshine of the garden to talk. I asked him about his relations with Rome, and he told me he feared there was little chance of their improving. He is almost hopeless about the Church ever now putting itself upon progressive lines. They have committed themselves too far at the Vatican. He will not, I think, long retain even what remains of his connection with it. I exhorted him, however, to stay on as long as he can, for though I had myself passed beyond all possibility of belief, I thought it a pity there should be no half-way house anywhere. As regards his personal circumstances he has no need to seek a change, for his life at Storrington is an ideal one for a thinker, retirement in a lovely village with pleasant, intellectual society, male and female, and ample time to write and read. Presently Father Fawkes joined us, a fellow Modernist priest, and then Miss Petre and we sat an hour under the trees. He is to come to Newbuildings for a couple of nights when he can find time.

“_13th Oct._—Farid Bey has telegraphed about a rumour current in Egypt that England has declared a protectorate. Though possible it is very unlikely. I have telegraphed back to tell him so.

“_16th Oct._—The situation in Bulgaria grows more and more warlike. In my opinion Grey is being taken in by the European diplomatists, who are one and all, except perhaps the French, opposed to reform in Turkey, having their own axes to grind there. These are encouraging Bulgaria to pick a quarrel with Constantinople and bring about a counter-revolution and will probably succeed. It is just the old game of 1876-77. The Turkish army is disorganized (only half mobilized) while the Bulgarian army is on a war footing. Our English support of the Young Turk is clearly platonic, though we may intervene if Constantinople itself is threatened.