Chapter I: Death of Queen Victoria, 1901 (1)

“_23 Jan._, 1901. _Sheykh Obeyd_.

The Queen is dead of an apoplectic stroke and the great Victorian age is at an end.”

Such is almost the first entry in my diary of the new year and the new century. I was in Egypt when the tidings reached me. It was the second day of the Bairam festival, and all our country folk at Sheykh Obeyd were keeping holiday, a glorious morning of sunshine, and I had been watching the foxes in the garden at play among the beans which were coming into flower. It was thus the news reached me. The entry goes on:

“This is notable news. It will mean great changes in the world, for the long understanding amongst the Emperors that England is not to be quarrelled with during the Queen’s lifetime will now give place to freer action. The Emperor William does not love his uncle, our new king. On the other hand, it may possibly lead to a less bloody régime in South Africa; not that the Prince of Wales very likely is any more humane than his mother, who had a craze for painting the map Imperial red, but because he knows European opinion better and the limitations of England’s power and the necessity of moderating English arrogance. The Queen it was easy to flatter and mislead, the only paper she read was the ‘Morning Post,’ and the people about her did not dare tell her the real truth of things, but the Prince of Wales hears and knows everything that goes on abroad far more than does Lord Salisbury. All this is to the good. I suppose there must be a new dissolution of Parliament—this also is for the good. As to Her Majesty personally, one does not like to say all one thinks even in one’s journal. By all I have ever heard of her she was in her old age a dignified but rather commonplace good soul, like how many of our dowagers, narrow-minded in her view of things, without taste in art or literature, fond of money, having a certain industry and business capacity in politics, but easily flattered and expecting to be flattered, quite convinced of her own providential position in the world and always ready to do anything to extend and augment it. She has been so long accustomed to success that she seems to have imagined that everything she did was wise and right, and I should not be surprised if the discreditable failure in South Africa had hastened her end. I see that Roberts went down to Osborne just before the seizure took place, and perhaps she may have insisted upon hearing the whole truth from him and, realizing it for the first time, have had the stroke of which she died. We shall probably be kept in the dark about this for a long while, for the public has got to look upon the old lady as a kind of fetish or idol, and nobody, even now she is dead, will dare print a word not to her glorification.

“_3rd Feb._—The Prince of Wales has been proclaimed as Edward VII and begins his reign with the usual acclamations of the vulgar, the vulgar in this instance including everybody, all his little failings forgotten or hidden well out of sight. He has certain good qualities of amiability and a Philistine tolerance for other people’s sins which endear him to rich and poor, from archbishops down to turf bookmakers, and the man in the street. He will make an excellent king for twentieth century England. His nephew, the Emperor William, has come forward to stand his sponsor in face of the world, an evil conjunction, for William is the Apostle of European violence. All the same I should not be surprised to see German influence brought to bear upon the Boer war. Our people are pretty nearly at their wits’ end what to do in South Africa. The war is costing them a million and a half a week and the financial gamblers are losing money. There is a reaction against the war now that it looks like a losing concern, and perhaps they may be glad of a pretext, such as the Queen’s death affords, to try and bring about an arrangement with the Boers. William would be flattered to be the _Deus ex machina_ and so recover his popularity in Germany which has been much compromised by his refusal to receive old Kruger. I am not sure, however, that the Boers will accept anything short of entire independence. There is talk of the Queen having expressed a strong wish for peace on her death-bed. What I hear through a very confidential channel is that Her Majesty’s last wish was a very human one, that her little dog should be allowed to jump up on her bed and that it was with her till she died.

“_6th Feb._—We are preparing for another desert expedition. Things go on in South Africa without change, the Boers having overrun the British colonies and cut the railway lines and Kitchener and the army are at a deadlock, unable to move, the soldiers tired of it and pinched for supplies. There is a report, however, that the arrangement entered into with Portugal is to come into effect and that English troops are to be landed in Delagoa Bay. It is very doubtful, however, whether this will affect the issue much.

“The new hero in England just now is the Emperor William, whom all abused and laughed at four years ago and whose boots our people are now licking. There is nothing so mean in the world as the British mob, unless it be the British aristocracy, but now our fine lords and ladies, though they adulate royalty, do so with their tongues in their cheeks, and this saves to some extent their self-respect. Wilhelm, however, has been made a Field Marshal of the British army! and I verily believe our people would offer him the crown of England if he expressed a wish for it. I suppose all this means that Edward VII has joined the Triple Alliance.

“The Duke of Aosta is attending the old Queen’s funeral as a _persona grata_ on account of Princess Hélène and her sister the Queen of Portugal, to whose good will very likely the Delagoa Bay job is due. These things are managed nowadays between Kings and Princes far more than between Ministers and Ambassadors, and royalty was never in such high feather as now. The Queen has left an unknown number of millions, it is said, to her family, but the heir to the Crown is to have his debts paid by the nation at a time when not a single million has been spared for the famine in India—truly we deserve to follow Spain and Rome and the other Empires into the gulf. There is an article in the ‘Fortnightly’ signed ‘Calchas’ closely on the lines of George’s conversation with me eighteen months ago about the coming struggle of the Empires to eat each other up. I wonder what George thinks now of his precious policy of forcing on the war and getting a leader for his government who would allow him and the other young bloods of the Tory party their ‘occasional amusements,’ I think that was his phrase the day we went up Chanclebury Ring together and he foreshadowed to me the policy of world-grabbing Chamberlain was to inaugurate.

“_13th Feb._—Charlie Adeane spent yesterday with us and we took him for a gallop round the Birkeh. Hampden writes that the war must go on until every Boer has been killed or wounded or made prisoner, but he says nothing now about deporting the Boer women, perhaps because that part of the work has been already done. His _saugrenu_ opinions are of value because he gets them direct from Chamberlain.

“_14th Feb._—To-day, while we were waiting for luncheon, we heard screams from the kitchen, and running to the window, I saw an old woman rush out brandishing a log of wood. I supposed at first it was a domestic quarrel of the cook’s, but as everybody in the house was taking part in the fray, I went down into the yard to see what the case really was, and found them hauling a wolf out of the kitchen by a rope, which they had got round its neck, belabouring it the while with staves. The cook’s boy was following them with his hand badly bitten. It appears that the boy had been left in charge of the stewpans, and, while he was watching them, what he thought was a dog, but which was really a wolf, looked in at the door. The boy turned to drive it out, when it sprang up at him and bit him on the hands. He caught it, however, by the throat (or rather, he afterwards explained, by the ears, which he said he could not let go, thus illustrating the proverb) and fell on it, while an old woman who was also there beat it with a log of wood. Then others came, and the boy still holding fast, they got the rope round its neck. When laid on the ground in the yard, the wolf pretended to be dead, though he did not look much hurt, but all declared he was mad and begged me to shoot him, and so reluctantly I did. He died without a groan, and from first to last did not make a sound. He was a fine dog-wolf, about the size of a collie dog, with reddish legs, and altogether a good deal redder than European wolves are, and a fine set of teeth. The boy was rather badly bitten, and after having his wounds washed, we sent him straight to Cairo to the Hydrophobic hospital. I cannot think the wolf was mad, as he was fat and in fine condition. He had no foam at the mouth, nor a haggard eye, nor any appearance of disease. I think rather, this being their breeding time, when they are bolder than usual, he simply followed his nose to a meal. We have often heard him lately howling in the garden, and once at night in the yard, so he probably knew his way about. The old woman, whose clothes had been torn and her legs bitten, but not badly, at once when the wolf was dead took some hairs from him to dress her wound with, and the heart was kept for the boy to eat. I had the wolf skinned; he was a powerful beast, with immense muscles in the throat and great depth of chest. There is at least one other in the garden; indeed, I hear one howling as I write.”

N.B. Naturalists affirm that there are no true wolves in Egypt, and the red colour of this one seems to show him to have been a jackal of the large kind which frequents Egyptian gardens. I am, however, certain that the true wolf is also found in the desert east of the Nile, for I have several times seen them at close quarters. The true wolf is a desert animal, and like other wolves, attacks sheep, hovering round the Bedouin encampments for the purpose. Suliman has sometimes suffered from their depredations just outside our garden wall, and in the hot weather they come inside it for the sake of the shade and the water. They breed, however, far away in the desert, whereas the jackal seldom leaves the cultivated district, I have measured wolf tracks in the desert sand as large as my hand.

This incident, which had a tragic sequel, as will be seen later, occurred while we were in full preparation for a desert journey of exploration in the Kalala mountains, and we left Sheykh Obeyd the following morning (15th February), and remained absent till 2nd March, during which time we had no communication whatever with the outer world. It was a very interesting expedition, covering a good deal of unexplored and difficult mountain land, following the romantic Wady Dem Dem to its source at the extreme ridge of the mountain overlooking the Red Sea and the Sinai Peninsula.

On our return after sixteen days’ absence we found the tragedy of the wolf already far advanced, and ten days later my diary contains the following:

“_13th March._—The poor boy Mohammed Sueylim, who was bitten by the wolf, is dead. He had been treated in Cairo on the Pasteur system and returned to us from the hospital on the 7th, having finished, they said, his cure. He was in good health and spirits and was at work on Friday in the kitchen as usual, but in the evening he complained that his arm hurt him, and we sent him to sleep at home with his family, intending that he should go back next day to see his doctor at Cairo, but his father, old Sueylim, objected to this, and he did not go. On the 9th he came with his father to the house, looking much frightened, and saying that he had a swelling in his throat and could neither eat nor drink, but still the father would not consent to his going back to the hospital. In the afternoon he was reported to be better, but it was followed by a bad night, and early on the 10th he was taken to Cairo. There the Italian Doctor Simon saw him and sent a note back with him to say he certainly had hydrophobia. He would have detained the boy, but the father would not allow him to remain in the hospital for fear they would dissect the boy if he should die there. However, on the morning of the 11th Sueylim took him in again, but again would not leave him, and the next night the boy, having gone raving mad, died.

“This is a horrible thing for which there seems no accounting according to any theory of Providence, for it is not even a case of our miserable civilization being in fault. It seems as if it might have happened in a pure state of nature, for here at Sheykh Obeyd the wild beasts have been allowed to come and go as they please without interference, nor have they ever before given trouble. Or is hydrophobia an effect of the unnatural condition of the tame dog, communicated to him by the wolf? Anyhow, it is a pitiful event. The boy was his father’s only son and support, who was doing his work quietly and well in the kitchen. The wolf, too, they tell me, leaves a widow and cubs in the garden. The old man complained pathetically of his loss. ‘I have seven daughters,’ he said, ‘anyone of which the wolf would have been welcome to, and he has taken my only son!’”

As to hydrophobia being perhaps an effect of civilization, there is more to be said in favour of its being so than I first imagined. I find that all the old travellers in Egypt, or at any rate many of them, make the remark as a noticeable circumstance that the dogs in Egypt, though there are so many of them, do not go mad. Hydrophobia seems to have been introduced with other Western diseases from Europe during the nineteenth century.

“_16th March._—Left Sheykh Obeyd with my nurse for Europe, leaving Anne and Judith to follow later, and slept at Alexandria, especially to see Dr. Ruffer, on whom I called in the morning at his villa at Ramleh. I went on purpose to consult him as a pupil of Pasteur on our kitchen tragedy. What he told me is briefly this. He tells me that, whereas only 13 per cent. of bites inflicted by dogs proved by dissection to have been mad are followed by hydrophobia, it is more serious in the case of wolf bites, 60 or 70 per cent. being the proportion of the bites followed by the disease. On the other hand, he tells me that the Pasteur treatment itself kills a proportion of 2 per cent. of the cases where it is used. It would therefore, he considers, be most rash to have oneself treated on the Pasteur system in the case of a simple dog bite and unless the dog had been ascertained by dissection to be mad. In the case of wolves or jackals, however, the advantage of the treatment would be far greater, though it would not be at all certain. In the case of being bitten Dr. Ruffer recommends nitric acid as the best immediate treatment of the wound. Burning, he says, is quite insufficient, but he is not very encouraging as to any cure.”

Ruffer’s opinion is of value as coming from so distinguished a disciple of Pasteur. I remember asking him at the end of our talk whether in his own case he would submit himself to the Pasteur treatment if bitten by a dog ascertained to be mad. He said: “I think so, but I should first make my will.” My impression is that he believed in the Pasteur treatment as of practical utility only in the case of wolf and jackal bites, while there was a certain risk of 2 per cent. in all cases subjected to the treatment whether the dog was mad or not.

This was the end of our stay in Egypt that winter of 1900-1901.

I had a pleasant voyage from Alexandria to Marseilles in company with Lord and Lady Chelsea, Hedworth Lambton, Lady Wolverton, and Lady St. Oswald. With Lambton, who was then in command of the Royal yacht, I had much conversation about Arabi, whom he had been to see three years before in Ceylon, a conversation which I think had much to do, seeing his position with the new King, with Arabi’s release later. He is a good fellow and a gallant officer, and we made friends.

After spending a week at Hyères on our way homewards with the Wyndhams, who were established there for the winter, and where I found George with his son Percy, I went on to England, arriving at Newbuildings on the 10th of April, where I take up my diary.

“_19th April._—Parliament met yesterday and Hicks-Beach’s budget has produced a sensation. He avows a deficit of 55 millions, and that the South African War has already cost 152 millions, which means that it will cost fully the 200 millions I predicted when the war began. He also had the courage to say that the working class which made the war ought to be taxed for it, and has clapped a duty on sugar and coals as well as an extra twopence on the income tax. This is better than I had dared hope from the Tories, though by rights the whole deficit should have been raised at once by a 20/- in the £ income tax if necessary.

“I went to Park Lane and found George Wyndham rather crestfallen over the narrow majorities the Government got last night and the show up of his preposterous war ‘amusement.’ He said he was all against the sugar and coal taxes as they would make the voters ‘tired of the Empire.’ Doubtless, too, he is angry with Hicks-Beach for his plain speaking, for George has always been a member of the intrigue which, as he told me two years ago, had for its object to get rid of the old Conservative leaders, especially of Hicks-Beach, who stood in the way of their little war amusements. George, however, will not take it too much to heart. His theory of politics is that a politician should ‘play the game,’ and that he owes no duty except to his party. All the same he is more responsible for the war than anybody else not actually in the Cabinet, for he was one of those who under Rhodes’ inspiration worked to bring it about. It is amusing to see that Rhodes, whose prime object in making the war was to slip out of his personal responsibility for the raid indemnity, a matter of a million sterling, has succeeded in getting the Government to wipe that matter publicly off the financial slate.

“After my talk with George, Sibell took me with her to Grosvenor House where we found the young Duke, her son, resplendent in uniform, having just come back from seeing Roberts of whom he has been begging a transference from the army to the Yeomanry. The morning sun was streaming through the windows, which made the rooms very beautiful, the ‘Blue Boy’ being especially splendid.

“_21st April (Sunday)._—To see Meynell, who was as usual full of gossip. It appears that the King’s debts have been paid off privately by his friends, one of whom is said to have lent £100,000, and satisfies himself with £25,000 in repayment plus a Knighthood.

“_22nd April._—Hampden dined with me in Chapel Street. As to South Africa he is quite converted now to ideas of peace and economy, the effect of the extra twopence on the income tax. He has two sons still at the war.

“_15th May._—As I was walking in Rotten Row this morning I was accosted by an imposing personage with the face and figure of a Roman Emperor, seated on a huge drayhorse, and I recognized in him John Redmond. I had not seen him since 1888 when I knew him in Ireland, and he has since become head of the Irish parliamentary party. He was very cordial in his greeting, and I was able most truthfully to congratulate him on the position of Irish affairs, which have never been so hopeful since Parnell died. We talked about George Wyndham. ‘He is a nice fellow,’ said Redmond, ‘and I like him much personally, as we all do.’

“_25th May._—Arabi has been pardoned. A fortnight ago I had a letter from him from Ceylon, telling me that the Duke of Cornwall had given him his royal promise to do what he could to obtain his release, and this is the result. If he had been recalled sixteen years ago, as Gladstone intended, he might have been of great use in reforming Egypt, but as it is the pardon has come too late. Arabi will find that the world has marched far during his absence, and the National Party has followed new lines which are not altogether his.

“_11th June._—To Sotheby’s where the Ashburnham MSS. are being sold. They are very splendid, but quite beyond my reach as a collector. I intend to confine my purchasing to Oriental MSS., where the field is open to a moderate purse, as for some inexplicable reason no one cares for them. Being in Quaritch’s shop a few days ago I heard the Librarian of the Bodleian declare that he was inundated with offers of these, for which there were no buyers. With Cockerell’s help I have got together about twenty illuminated ones at prices ranging from £4 to £10, though I gave £50 for one, a very fine ‘Shah Nameh,’ which had belonged to Morris. Some day these Oriental MSS. will be worth much larger sums, analogous to those given for European ones of equally fine execution.

“_14th June._—Hampden, whose son has just returned from South Africa, leaving another son still fighting there, and a nephew Campion dead, is now loud in denouncing the war. He would like to have Kruger and Rhodes and Chamberlain tied in a bag together and dropped into the sea. This from the ex-Liberal Unionist whip is a pretty good conversion.

“The Ashburnham MSS. have sold for £33,000, the finest of them a French version of _Lancelot du Lac_ for £1,800, a cheap price for perhaps the most beautiful book in the world.

“_27th June._—I have been going over old letters. Of men’s letters George Wyndham’s are by far the best, and I have a good series of them written at the most interesting period of his life, that of his literary interlude between the days when he was Arthur Balfour’s private Secretary, and his taking office as Under Secretary of State. They are all a man’s letters to a man can be, in some ways better even than Lytton’s, wonderful as those are.

“_29th June._—Hedworth Lambton came over from Portsmouth, where he is in command of the King’s yacht. He tells me the Duke of Cornwall’s intervention in favour of Arabi’s must certainly have been prearranged, probably before he left England, with the King. I took him over to Crabbet where he greatly admired our horses, regretting that his Majesty did not breed Arabs instead of Hackneys.

“_6th July._—Our annual Arab sale. A great concourse of people from London, including not a few notabilities. We sold twelve lots at an average of over 120 guineas, four (stallions) were bought for the Indian Government, three for New South Wales, two for Java, and one for Germany.

“_25th July._—News has come of a conflict at Sheykh Obeyd between some English officers fox hunting, and Mutlak, and our Arab guards. Our people have been arrested, and I went up to London to the Foreign Office for information and to protest. Old Giglamps (Sir Thomas Sanderson) received me with a little official manner, and talked of its being necessary to leave the matter to be settled by law, but I overbore him with a torrent of indignation, which is the best way to break down the official fence, and he became amiable, discussed the question with me, promised to speak about it at once to Cromer and advised me to address Lord Lansdowne formally, stating my view of the case. We parted the best of friends.” [This was the beginning of a long correspondence between me and the Foreign Office, which as it is embalmed in a Blue Book of forty- seven pages, I need not here relate in detail. The Blue Book is one of the most amusing ever issued by the Foreign Office.]

“_26th July._—Lunched with Frank Lascelles at the Travellers Club, and we talked of old days and of present days too. His success as Ambassador at Berlin, where he has captured the friendship of the Emperor William, is the greatest diplomatic achievement of our day, which he attributes modestly to his talent for making small jokes of the kind which royal personages like. He would not hear of Wilhelm’s being called ‘a clever ass.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘not at all. He knows everything and does everything, including painting and fiddling, and most things he knows well. In shipbuilding and engineering he surprises all the experts who have to do with him. Also he is a man. He really commands his army, and really governs his Empire.’ ‘A second Frederick the Great,’ I suggested. ‘Just so,’ he said. ‘That is what he would like to be thought.’

“_27th July._—With Cockerell to Parkstone to see Alfred Russel Wallace, the Grand Old Man of Science. Cockerell, who knew him already, had asked him to have a talk with me about the prehistoric horse, and an excellent talk it was. He lives in an uninteresting little red villa near the station, but the old man himself is a treasure. Though not able to give me much information on the subject I had come to him about, the early domestication of animals and especially of the horse, he was most instructive about the primitive races of mankind. He divides mankind into three great families, the White, the Black and the Yellow. Among the first he classes not only Semites and the lighter coloured Hindoos, but also the Dravidians, the Hairy Ainus and the Australians. He classes them by their features, and by the quality of their hair, which is long and wavy. The black races are the negroes, the negritos and all others who have crisped hair. The yellow race is characterized by comparatively hairless faces, and the absence of wave in their hair. The Aryans, he says, are a mere linguistic division of the white family, the distinction has nothing to do with the race. He holds it probable that civilization had only one birthplace, and from it had spread everywhere. The taming of animals was imitated from a first example of success by tribes communicating with the successful tribe. His socialistic talk was also interesting, and he displayed wonderful vigour of intellect for so old a man. He complimented me on my pamphlet, ‘The Shame of the XIXth Century’ and expressed strong views on the pauperization of India. There was a number of the paper ‘Light’ lying on his table, and I asked him if he still adhered to his belief in spiritualism, and he said very positively that he had not receded from it in the smallest degree.”

The month of August was occupied with a driving tour I made to Clouds and the West of England. While at Clouds I saw a good deal of one of our Royal Princesses, who was staying there, and whom it fell to my lot to entertain on a number of drives seated by me on the box seat, for I had my four in hand there. This was Princess Louise, daughter of Princess Christian and granddaughter of Queen Victoria. My conversations with this royal lady were a revelation to me of the political atmosphere in which our royal personages move.

“_20th Sept._—In London. A day of disaster for His Majesty’s arms by land and sea. Two defeats in South Africa, three guns lost to Botha in Natal, the 17th Lancers cut to pieces in Cape Colony, and His Majesty’s ship ‘Cobra’ totally wrecked off the Yorkshire coast. I called on George Wyndham and talked the situation over with him. The whole army, he says, is overdone and stale, the 17th Lancers have been on the run since the 10th of May, trying to catch the Boers, without a day’s rest, and it is the same with them all, horses and men can do no more. He thinks now the winter is over and the grass up on the veldt, our army will have to mark time and stay on the defensive till next year. He is beginning to think we shall have to make terms with the Boers. I suggested a ‘Reservation’ for them such as the Basutos have where they could be free and govern themselves and live in their own way. He told me in confidence he had long ago proposed exactly this solution as the only one to end the war. The Boers ought to be allowed a ‘blow hole.’ What they wanted was to lead a patriarchal life according to their own ideas. He thought that if this was allowed they would be eventually amalgamated with the rest of South Africa by the natural processes of progress. George is much pleased with his work in Ireland, and is glad now he did not get the War Office as he had wished. He is taking my advice of doing nothing, and waiting instead of forcing the situation, as people were urging him to do. He described a yachting tour he has made in very stormy weather with his son Percy. We also talked over the Fox-hunting case at Cairo; he has been staying with Lord Lansdowne.

“_21st Sept._—There is another defeat this morning, two more guns taken. Hampden is now all for ending the war.

“_25th Sept._—Rennell Rodd is gazetted our Ambassador to Rome.

“_28th Sept._—Cromer’s marriage with Lady Katharine Thynne announced.

“_3rd Oct._—Captain H—— came to shoot with me and Neville. He has just come from the war. He thinks the fault lies in not hanging the Boers, man, woman, and child.

“_4th Oct._—To London. Met Austin Lee at the Club. He tells me Cromer’s engagement was a very sudden affair. Cromer had been down to lay a wreath on his late wife’s grave at Bournemouth, and had taken his place in the steamer for Cairo with Gorst. Gorst had gone on to Paris, and he was to meet him there, but this engagement has intervened.

“_11th Oct._—At Gros Bois on my way to Egypt, and find here a large party of French people come over from Paris for the day, the Duchesse de Trévise and her daughters, and her son-in-law, de Brissac, and with them Lady Windsor and Lady Paget. In the afternoon I was taken out shooting by Wagram, the other two guns being country neighbours, de Kergoulet and Lagrange, in the Forêt de Notre Dame. Berthe’s two girls are growing up charming, with the prettiest possible manners, and quite unspoilt.

“_13th Oct. (Sunday)._—The ladies all went off in Berthe’s new automobile to Vaux, and I with Wagram to Paris. There we were met by Alexandre, and after breakfasting at Durand’s we went to see a new play at the Theâtre Antoine, ‘L’honneur,’ a piece translated from the German of an exaggerated Ibsen kind, which interested me not a little. Alexandre acted the cicerone there to his father and me, explaining the play to us learnedly as it went on.

“_14th Oct._—Shooting again with Wagram. All his ground here is beautiful and of great extent, and he has pride in every inch of it. Some 7,000 acres, if I understand him rightly, in a ring fence, for France a very large estate, and only surpassed anywhere near Paris by those of the Rothschilds, who have between them about 30,000 acres.

“_15th Oct._—After a last day’s shooting I left in the evening for Marseilles and Egypt with Anne, who had joined me in Paris.

“_24th Oct.—At Sheykh Obeyd._ Mohammed Abdu came to spend the morning. He tells me he has incurred the Khedive’s displeasure by having performed the marriage ceremony for one of the Khedivial Princes in Switzerland this summer. The Khedive had given his permission, but had intended to back out of it. We discussed the Fox-hunting case. This, he assures me, contains not merely strainings of the law, but positive illegalities on the part of the English authorities. Then we talked of Arabi’s return to Egypt. Mohammed Abdu blames him for having held communications with the newspapers, and without waiting to ascertain the true state of things, having proclaimed that everything done by the English in Egypt was good. This has got him into trouble with the native official world, which has given him the cold shoulder, though he is much run after by the common herd. Boys follow him in the street shouting ‘_Allah yensurak ya Arabi!_’ (God give you the victory O Arabi!), and in the mosque when he goes to pray the poorer sort kiss his hands. He, Abdu, disapproves of this, and has not called on him, but I think I have persuaded him that it will be best to make the most of the popularity, and he has promised to meet Arabi at my house when he comes. I am of opinion that a great deal might be profitably made of Arabi in the cause of Egyptian freedom, but Arabi’s popularity with the vulgar was always a source of jealousy with the well-to-do.

“Later Raffiuddin Ahmed, a leader of the Mohammedan community in London, called on me, and I had with him also a long and interesting conversation. He told me things that were interesting of the influence over the late Queen Victoria exercised by her Indian Munshi, with whom he was intimate. Her Majesty allowed the Munshi to have the key of her despatch boxes and to read all their contents, even during the Cretan difficulty and the Sultan’s war with Greece. He read the despatches every morning, and told the Queen which were the most important. The Prime Minister knew this and did not object, as the Munshi was really discreet. As soon, however, as the Queen was dead he was packed off back to India. Raffiuddin seems to have read everything I have ever written, and has a surprising memory of dates and facts. He tells me that through his friend the Munshi, he got the Queen to read my protest published in the ‘Times’ against the massacre of Omdurman. He was to have been put forward by Lord Salisbury for a seat in Parliament, but happened to be away in Constantinople at the time of the general elections. Now, poor man, I fear he is in very ill-health, and is on his way back to India to recover, or, as to me seems more probable, to die.

“_26th Oct._—To-day Arabi came to lunch with us in company with Ali Fehmy and their friend the doctor. Arabi is still a hale and hearty man, and his white beard becomes him well. I found him simple and affectionate, and very grateful to me. It appears that my telegram of congratulation received by him on the 23rd of May was the first news he had of his release and pardon. It was not officially communicated to him till the 26th. I had a long talk with him about the attitude he was to observe on political affairs, and was pleased to find him with definite opinions. He is too trustful, to my mind, of English good intentions, having experienced only kind treatment during his exile, and it is right he should be grateful, otherwise his view does not differ much from mine or Abdu’s. I advised him to be content with what he had already said publicly, to call on the Khedive, if the Khedive would receive him, and on Lord Cromer. He has so much dignity, frankness and honesty that his personal presence must do good. Then Mohammed Abdu came in and they embraced, and talked till luncheon, and through it and afterwards for an hour and more, recounting old experiences and discussing modern men. The meeting was eminently a success, and was really a touching one for us all in many ways. I had, however, fever on me, and was glad to get to bed as soon as they were gone.”

Arabi’s return to Egypt was robbed of the success it ought to have been by his initial mistake of having allowed himself to be interviewed on his landing at Suez by one of the staff of the “Mokattam,” a newspaper carried on by certain Syrians in the interest of the British occupation, who gave a garbled account of what he had said in praise of the reforms introduced under the English régime so as to make it appear like a recantation of his patriotism. The Khedive, too, never really forgave him nor did Lord Cromer. Arabi was too simple-minded a man not to give opportunities to those ill disposed towards him, and he made the mistake when calling upon Cromer of concealing the fact that he had first called on me, and this was used against him. On the 19th Nov. I called on Lord Cromer and spoke of this with him, who made me a history of the pressure he had put on the Khedive to get him to consent to the exile’s return, the line taken by him being that Arabi was no longer of any political consequence. He had received him but they had had little conversation together.

The history of Arabi’s recall from exile is without doubt that King Edward thought it would be politic and insisted on it with the Foreign Office. I have always suspected that Admiral Lambton’s visit to me at Newbuildings, though ostensibly to look at my horses, was really in connection with this matter as during it we had talked much of Arabi. Lambton had been a believer in Arabi from the time of Arabi’s trial in 1882, when he had given useful evidence in his favour. Lambton was also with the Duke of York (now King George V) when he visited Colombo and had the talk there already referred to with Arabi. The exile’s recall had been in consequence imposed on Lord Cromer, who was conscious that the whole case for intervention by England in 1882 rested on the logic of Arabi’s being a rebel and his patriotism unreal. While therefore Cromer submitted to the pressure put upon him by the Foreign Office he was determined to neutralize the good effect of it as an act of tardy reparation for a wrong done by managing to get the pardoned exile put in coventry by Mustapha Fehmy and the rest of the Khedivial Ministers. In that way Arabi’s initial popularity was neutralized and robbed of any political effect.

“_23rd Nov._—To-day I went to see the Khedive who was as cordial and affectionate as usual. He began by making me an elaborate apology for not having paid me his promised visit at Crabbet when he was in England in June 1900 (I had not been to see him since) and how he had several times asked Rennell Rodd, who had been appointed by the Foreign Office to look after him, to arrange the visit, and how Rodd had always said there was no time. Then I thanked him for having pardoned Arabi, and he told me that Arabi had displeased him by his political pronouncements on arrival and by his always being with Ali Fehmy who had behaved so badly to his father Tewfik, and how he had also heard of Mohammed Abdu’s having been to lunch with me when Arabi came to Sheykh Obeyd, and how wrong it was of Abdu. But I told him I was the only person to blame in the matter as I had entrapped Abdu who had been most unwilling, and he laughed and said he would make it all right with Abdu when he saw him. Then we talked about the Fox-hunting case and he told me of the _peur bleue_ he had been in for years past lest the English soldiers should break in on him at Koubbah where his garden was so little protected; also of the Omdeh of Waila having been stopped on the road by a party of Lancers on his way home as he was riding with two servants, and how they had struck him on the head and how he had died a fortnight after it. He is off to Khartoum next week and he went with me to the door shaking hands and assuring me of his great affection and that I was the only true friend they had in Egypt.

“_28th Nov._—Our yearly _mowled_ of Sheykh Obeyd, a festival attended by about a thousand people and all the Arabs and Sheykhs of the villages round, and we had horse races and _jerid_ play the whole day long in the bit of desert outside, and not a European showed his nose from dawn to dusk.

“_19th Dec._—Rosebery has made a speech which is causing much excitement at home, offering himself as alternative Prime Minister to Salisbury on equally jingo lines. Salisbury is bad enough, but Rosebery would mean merely Government by the Stock Exchange.

“_30th Dec._—Left Sheykh Obeyd for England, having hurried my departure principally on account of the fox-hunting case which was being brought forward in Parliament. We went by way of Port Said and Brindisi. Rhodes, Jameson and others of the South African gang were to have taken the same steamer but I believe missed it. They had come to Egypt with the intention of going up the Nile to Khartoum, but Cromer, who hates Rhodes, put a veto on that and stopped the party at Assouan.

“_16th Jan._ 1902.—London. Hampden dined last night with Rosebery, where he was more or less solicited to join Rosebery’s party, and we talked over the prospects of Liberalism. My advice to him was that if he wanted office or further employment of any kind, Rosebery was as likely to give it him as any other, though he would never come into office as head of the Radical party. Apart from this, however, there were only two policies on which party lines could run, the first of Imperialism, which meant a bid for the Empire of the world, a gambling venture which would entail the sacrifice of everything we have of value at home, personal liberty, freedom from conscription and financial prosperity; the other Anti-imperialism, which meant letting the world alone and leaving the colonies to work out their own destinies without our interference, and the same for Ireland.

“_22nd Jan._—Lunched with Labouchere, who was as usual very amusing, describing the intrigues and dissensions of the Liberal leaders. ‘If you were to take them all together,’ he said, ‘and boil them in a pot, Campbell Bannerman, Asquith, Morley, Rosebery, and Grey, you would not get the worth of a mouse out of them.’ Of the Liberal Imperialists none had any following in the country except Rosebery. He told, too, some interesting stories about his own past adventures, how he had ridden once from Cairo to Suez in company with Shepheard, the founder of the hotel, sleeping one night on the road, also from Damascus to Palmyra with Lady Ellenborough and her Bedouin husband Mijuel some time in the fifties, when she was still almost a young woman. And again in Mexico with a notorious robber. He was in every way most pleasant. I have known Labby now for forty years and feel a real affection for him.

“_24th Jan._—Called on Redmond at St. Ermin’s Club. He holds a high position now in the House of Commons and in the world. He was in America last autumn and tells me everyone there is pro-Boer including Roosevelt, the President.

“_28th Jan._—I have been, since Saturday, at Hewell and have seen much of Rowton who is staying here. He has been most agreeable. I have had him pretty nearly to myself and we have made great friends. He still delights to talk of his old master Dizzy and described how they first met at Raby in 1865. There was a large party in the castle, and Rowton, a young fellow then of five-and-twenty, was asked by the ladies one evening to play the fool for their amusement, and he had sung a comic song and was in the middle of a breakdown when he caught the eye of the old man fixed on him and was filled with shame at being detected in such absurdity, but in the course of the evening a hand was laid upon his shoulder and a lugubrious voice said, ‘Mr. Corry, I shall ask you some day to be my impressario.’ This led to a talk on serious subjects, and eventually to Rowton’s being taken on as assistant private secretary. Ralph Earle was then the first private secretary, but he threw up his position with Disraeli to take an appointment in the City soon after, and made use of his former position to look in at Downing Street and read the confidential papers for his profit on the Stock Exchange. Rowton was given his succession, but had the disagreeable task assigned him of telling Earle he was to come there no longer. Earle revenged himself by making a bitter speech against his former master at a critical moment in the House of Commons. The thing affected Dizzy deeply, less from the ingratitude shown by Earle than from shame at having been taken in and trusted his secrets to such a man. Rowton is full of such anecdotes, and when I pressed him to write them, even if he did not publish, confessed that the real reason was that he lacked the literary gift and could not do it well. He told me, too, of the story current that Dufferin was really Disraeli’s son, but he had found evidence in the papers left him that Disraeli had only made Lady Dufferin’s acquaintance six years after Dufferin was born. Dufferin, who had heard the story, was most grateful to Rowton for letting him have the memorandum proving this, and had inserted it in his mother’s life. Another story was of how Disraeli came to be Christianized. Isaac Disraeli, the father, had given offence to the Jews by his unorthodox writings and was fined £50 by his synagogue. This angered him and he went straight away and joined the Church of England and had his children christened, Dizzy being then about ten years old. But for this quarrel the son never could have got into Parliament or made even the beginning of a political career.

“_3rd Feb._—Lunched with Mark Napier who is just back from India where he has been settling a legal claim for a native prince. It had been hung up for thirteen years, but he got it pushed through by George Curzon in ten days. (Such is the virtue of the Crabbet Club.) He gave a good account of George and of his surprising energy and power of work, which leaves him no time for amusement. He is master of everybody, Mark says, and so is not altogether popular with the high officials, but seemed to be so with everybody else.

“_4th Feb._—Called on George Wyndham and had a long talk with him about Ireland, which wholly occupies him. He is far more in sympathy with the Nationalists than with the Castle party which he despises for its sycophancy or the Ulster Protestants whom he dislikes for their sour bigotry. His own people, however, are constantly worrying him to coerce, and he has been obliged to make a show of doing something in that way though most unwillingly. He told me he had quite come to agree with me that there was no possibility of doing anything of real good in Ireland under present conditions and the less done by a Chief Secretary, the less the harm. He thinks, however, that if Ireland could be governed as a Crown Colony for five years things might come right. This is a curious remedy which would need fifty, not five years to have any effect. He was delighted when I repeated what Redmond said about him and that the Irish members still regarded him with a friendly eye.

“Then he read me a long letter from his brother Guy written at the end of the year, describing a fight he had been engaged in in Cape Colony against Smuts in which he took credit that he had held his ground. I remarked that I had thought the Boers had long ago been cleared out of Cape Colony, at which George laughed aloud. Guy in another letter said that to try to prevent Boers going where they chose to go was like trying with a single squadron to prevent two squadrons passing a line between Bath and Salisbury. It is clear the war is far from over.

“_14th Feb._—Found George Wyndham at breakfast and walked with him across Green Park to his Irish Office. I congratulated him on the new Japanese Alliance (the Convention of Alliance with England had been signed on 30th Jan.) which is the best thing the Government has done for a long while, but George is quite disillusioned about politics or the possibility of much affecting the course of the world’s events. Chamberlain is the hero of the day in spite of his absurd blunders in South Africa, because he talks big and defies European opinion.

“There is a funny story current:

_Master to Boy_: “Who was it made the world?”

_Boy_: “Mr. Chamberlain.”

_Master_: “Think again. Wasn’t it God made the world?”

_Boy_: “Oh, go on! You are a pro-Boer.”

“_22nd Feb._—Rosebery has cut the Liberal painter and has passed out into the wilderness.

“_23rd Feb._—Lord Dufferin’s death is in the papers. His end was tragic, but carelessness in money matters was the weak point in his character. When he came of age, I remember hearing, he had a quite unencumbered estate of £20,000 a year, but he muddled it away, Heaven knows on what, for he was not a gambler nor a runner after women, only he kept no accounts and liked to do things on a grand scale. For the last thirty years he has lived on his pay as a Government servant, always in the highest posts. Then when his time of service was over he found himself with a large family of children and a pension of less than £3,000 a year. He took Whitaker Wright’s £6,000 a year to enable him to live. In all things else he was singularly high-minded, with a chivalrous devotion to his mother, the one passion of his life. He trifled with women rather than made love to them, and when his mother died, his chief affections went to his children. He was a faithful friend, retentive of old memories and was rightly beloved by all. I knew him when he was only thirty-three, a good-looking and attractive young man travelling in the East with his mother. His marriage was arranged for him by his mother, a year or two later, and he accepted it as he would have accepted anything else from her hands.

“_28th Feb._—Yesterday I went to see poor Peploe Brown (the painter), and found him strangely altered. He has been paralysed for some years and is now a little wizened old man, quite helpless in his chair, but preserving all his old powers of talk. He sits there a pathetic figure in his studio in York Place surrounded by canvases of gigantic size, the monuments of ancient failures in his art, blind and alone but for the devotion of a man servant who waits always within call. This man, Fred, deserves a medal of gold if ever a servant did, for he puts his whole soul into his service, and I fancy even without wages, for Brown is almost penniless. Poor Brown, what a terrible life! yet he does not complain because he can still see light out of the corner of one eye, also he suffers no pain, and he sleeps well.