Part 2 — CHAPTER I

DEATH OF QUEEN VICTORIA, 1901

[1901]“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.

[1902]“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.

“2nd March (Sunday).—Walked across the Park and lunched with Frederic Harrison. I sat next to Miss Hobhouse, recently come back from South Africa where she was prevented by our authorities from landing. She is an amiable middle-aged woman, much persecuted on account of her action in the concentration camps. People are rude to her, refuse to shake hands, and they get up to go when she enters a drawing-room. Others of the party were Henry Arthur Jones the playwright, young Trevelyan the poet, and Lady Gregory.

“In the evening with Lady Gregory to Newton Hall to hear Harrison deliver his farewell address on retiring from the leadership of the Positivists. The beginning of it was rather tame and I was dosing off when I was awakened by an allusion to my work in Egypt and hearing my name cheered. After this Harrison gave a really fine address, saying many hard things and true things of modern England, touching, too, from the fact of its being his last spoken word.

“11th March.—Learned last night of the defeat and capture of Methuen by Delarey. The news of the capture was heartily cheered by the Irish in the House. It was the King’s wedding-day.

“12th March.—Called on Father John Gerard, S.J., in Farm Street, whom I had last seen fifty years ago at Stonyhurst where he was my special boy friend. He had written to me, and hence my visit. I found him a worthy matter-of-fact Jesuit advanced in years but preserving just the little touch of romance which had prompted his letter to me about our childish school friendship when we were both twelve years old. He reminded me that we used to keep caterpillars in paper boxes and that I had insisted upon pricking holes in the lids in the form of the constellations so that the caterpillars inside might think they were still out of doors and could see the stars.

“14th March.—Methuen has been released and the newspapers are full of praise of Delarey, the first time they have had a word of civility for any Boer since the war began.

“15th March.—To the Zoölogical Gardens to look at Prevalsky’s wild horses, just arrived. They are miserable specimens, like the poorest and weediest of the New Forest ponies, coarse-headed, knock-kneed, cat-hammed and with drooping donkey tails, yet distinctly horses.

“17th March (St. Patrick’s Day).—To George Wyndham, who explained to me the difficult position he was in with the Tory Press on account of his Irish policy. ‘They are all waiting,’ he said, ‘to pounce on me because I won’t go their way in Ireland.’ He promised to tell me some day the whole history of the last fortnight, as to which I gather from him that he was obliged to threaten resignation rather than go in for a policy of extreme coercion, which has always failed and will fail again. Then to John Redmond in Wynnstay Gardens. I found him just arrived by the night train from Manchester, where he spoke on Saturday, but alert and smiling. It being St. Patrick’s Day, somebody had sent him a little box full of shamrock and he opened it and gave me a bunch which I shall try and grow at Newbuildings as it has a root, but he warned me it would never grow out of Ireland. We talked about George. He was perfectly aware how matters stood with him. ‘I am obliged,’ he said ‘to be fierce with him in public, but I know he is with us in his heart, and we all know it.’ I like Redmond, he is a thoroughly straightforward good fellow, strong and practical and self-reliant but not self-assertive, a worthy successor of Parnell. I was surprised to hear him regretting Rhodes’ illness and saying that he would be a great loss if he died. I asked him why, and he said that Rhodes has always been a Home Ruler about Ireland as part of his Imperial Federation scheme, and also because he thought the Irish quarrel ought to be settled in the interest of the Empire. Redmond had seen a great deal of Rhodes when he was in South Africa, and believed he still held to his Home Rule opinions. My own opinion of Rhodes, on this as on other points, is that he is a rogue and a humbug. The King and Queen are sending him their royal condolences about his illness.

“21st March.—John Dillon was suspended last night in the House of Commons for calling Chamberlain ‘a damned liar.’

“22nd March.—Dined in Park Lane and met there Lady Ormond and the Berkeley Pagets. George explained to me his new Irish Land Bill after dinner, which he does not profess to regard as anything but a makeshift. As far as I understand it, it is a scheme devised to buy up the quite small holdings in the West and group them into farms of fifteen and twenty acres. He again said that he was very averse from Coercion, but added that the Government might be driven into it, and it would then mean something much more than what had hitherto been done, and would involve the imprisonment of all the leaders of the League, and government by force in Ireland after the manner of a Crown Colony. He would do what he could to make things go quietly, but there were strong forces at work pushing to extremities, witness the ‘Times’ articles. I told him I was inviting Redmond to dinner, and asked him whether he would come. He said there was nothing he should like better, but it would be too dangerous in his present position, and as long as he was Chief Secretary.

“24th March.—Took my niece Mary Milbanke, it being Lent, to a mediæval morality play, ‘Everyman,’ being just now revived, a terribly dreary business, which more than half reconciled me to having been born in the nineteenth century. These ancient plays have only an archæological interest and are impossible on our modern stage. They are worse than the worst comic parts of Shakespeare, which is saying a great deal, crude, childish, long-winded. The mediæval idea of life in Christian Europe with death and hell as a perpetual background of all pleasure, is repellent, when put nakedly before us in action. There is a brutality in the view of all pleasure being sinful, which is only tolerable when mixed with a large dose of scepticism, as in Boccaccio. These north of Europe plays with their serious intention are like having a bucket of cold and very dirty water poured over one for a joke.

“In the evening to hear an excellent lecture by Sir William Butler on Cromwell in Ireland, a most able and brilliant performance. I was asked to say a few words afterwards, and did so lamely enough.

“25th March.—George has made a brilliant speech introducing his Irish Land Bill, and I see Redmond and his men are very civil to him. I pride myself on having contributed to this good feeling.

“30th March (Easter Sunday).—Rhodes is dead. I did the rogue an injustice when I thought he might be shamming as a pretext for getting away from the Cape and the prosecution of Princess Radziwill, in which he is implicated, but Rhodes was one of those of whom one always had to ask oneself, ‘Quel interêt peut-il avoir en mourant?’ The capitalist newspapers are, of course, full of his praises. He is supposed to have bequeathed a part of his millions for Imperial purposes. I look on him only as a lucky speculator, a gambler on rather wider lines than the rest, shrewd, or rather lucky, in his calculations for a long while, and then, having made a series of gross blunders, unscrupulous enough to save most of his own money at the expense of a war and ruin for everybody else. I suppose he will live in history as he has given his name to Rhodesia, and has engineered the Boer War. If the British Empire recovers from this and asserts itself permanently in South Africa he may count for something more, but it is quite certain that he miscalculated the whole Transvaal business. His pronouncements from time to time during the last five years have been always contradicted by events. Some people say this was only an excess of roguery. I think he really blundered and blustered and pretended to be wise to people who looked upon him, on account of his first successes, as an oracle. I have seen just the same thing at Homburg in the old gambling days, when a man who had broken the bank once was followed by admiring crowds, who credited him with supernatural intelligence, and went on believing in him till the day he lost all and disappeared. Rhodes had the intelligence to go away with a large share of his winnings in his pocket, but his friends have been ruined following his lead.

“My niece Mary Milbanke is with me. I am very fond of her; there is something soothing in her phlegmatic nature and absence of all ambition, personal or otherwise.

“11th April.—37 Chapel Street. I entertained Miss Hobhouse at lunch with Meynell and Margaret Sackville, and we discussed Rhodes’ will, the topic of everybody’s talk. It is astonishing the general adulation bestowed on the man. People do not see that the £4,000,000 he leaves to public purposes are £4,000,000 robbed from the public and bequeathed to the ends of new robberies. Meynell was amusing and pleasant as he always is.

“17th April.—St. George Lane Fox brought his cousin Lord Russell with him to lunch with me to-day. We talked over matters connected with Egypt and the attack I am making on Cromer as having tampered with the Criminal Courts at Cairo. Russell, though wrong-headed, is a very able man, and has legal experience and much practice in speaking as alderman of the London County Council and in Committees of the House of Lords. He is also quite fearless of Governments. I should not be surprised to see him some day Opposition leader in the Lords. He has a good presence, a good voice, and a wonderful memory. Our luncheon was amusing.

“19th April.—Hunted from Fernycroft with the Foxhounds. Young Bron Herbert was out and rode with me very pluckily, poor fellow, with his cork leg replacing the one lost in the Boer War. He is a very clever and very nice young man, but has been captured for service on the ‘Times’—a bad education. His sister, he tells me, has joined the Theosophists and gone off to live in California.

“26th April.—Lady Gregory called and took me off to dinner with her and Yeats and afterwards to a meeting of the Irish Literary Society, where the Cuchulain Saga was discussed. I spoke on it and so did O’Donnell, he partly in Irish, partly in English—an interesting man. Yeats also spoke well. He is a pleasant talker on his own subjects, and in appearance is of that most interesting dark Irish type with pale face and lank hair.

“5th May.—Anne writes from Egypt announcing somewhat enigmatically that Cromer has had a final quarrel with the Khedive and is trying to depose him. I think this not unlikely, but it would be difficult for him to do unless the Great Powers were to decide to divide the Mohammedan States between them. This is nearly certain to happen some day. I suppose France will be given Morocco; Italy, Tripoli; England, Egypt; Germany, Syria and Asia Minor; Austria, Constantinople; and Russia, Persia. [Compare Secret Treaties of 1916.]

“6th May.—Lunched with Ralph. He has decided at last to publish the great Byron Secret, and has drawn up the case against Byron and Mrs. Leigh in the form of a book called ‘Astarte.’ This is very ably done, but to my mind is marred by an introduction violently attacking Murray, the publisher, with whom he has quarrelled over Murray’s recent edition of Byron’s Works. I shall endeavour to get him to modify this; indeed, I think the whole thing might without much injustice to Lady Byron’s memory be let sleep. It is an ugly story, however told.

“10th May.—Anne has returned from Egypt. I met her at Charing Cross and gave her breakfast here in Chapel Street and saw her off to Newbuildings, I being obliged to go to Ockham for Sunday with Cockerell, where Ralph is to consult us about ‘Astarte’ and its form of publication.

“11th May (Sunday).—At Ockham. Cockerell and I have spent the day trying to persuade Lovelace to omit his attacks on Murray, which are really undignified, and also, we think, unjust in so far as they concern the present representative of the firm.

“18th May (Sunday).—I have sent in my letter to Lord Salisbury. It went last night to Hatfield with a private note inside to Schomberg McDonnell explaining that I hoped Lord Salisbury would read it himself. It is a big venture as I am attacking Cromer personally, but in big game shooting it is safest to leave the antelopes alone and go straight for the rhinoceros. It being holiday time makes it a favourable moment.

“21st May.—My bomb against Cromer has exploded with a real bang. The ‘Daily News’ gives it a leading article, the ‘Standard’ a whole column, the ‘Morning Post’ printed my letter to the Editor and a résumé, the ‘Chronicle’ and ‘Daily Mail’ are also good, only the ‘Times’ and ‘Telegraph’ fail us. It could hardly have made a bigger noise.”

The great publicity obtained on this occasion in the Press made it unnecessary for me to pursue it further, and it was agreed not to bring it forward in Parliament. There was, of course, not the smallest chance of obliging the Foreign Office to publish the correspondence, and the publicity was already obtained. Moreover, before the Foreign Office Vote came on for discussion the King’s illness had occurred, and nobody had any attention to pay elsewhere. The case was of importance, not so much in itself as from the demonstration it gave of the unscrupulous methods resorted to by our diplomacy at Cairo to hide its tampering with the Law Courts and whitewash the misdeeds of the Army of Occupation; the publicity made it possible for me later to fix on Cromer the responsibility of the scandalous Denshawai case.

“29th May.—An early luncheon with George Wyndham and sat talking with him for a couple of hours, mostly on his Irish policy. I am amused to find him more and more of a Home Ruler, though he does not quite avow it. He seems to have found out that it is a choice between that and Government as a Crown Colony. I asked him whether he did not think the Local Self Government Bill in Ireland had played entirely into the Nationalists’ hands, and he admitted that perhaps it had, but it had been a necessary part of the general Unionist policy of treating Ireland precisely on the same lines as England. It might lead indirectly to a sort of Home Rule, that is to say it might come to a union of the local councils under one general council at Dublin which would practically settle all Irish affairs. In the meanwhile the law had to be carried out. There was hardly any real crime in Ireland; but where the law was very clearly broken the Crimes Act must be put in force. He believed the Irish leaders would secretly quite approve of this, for they did not want crime any more than the Government did. What had always been resented was the blundering in the choice of cases to be dealt with. On the whole, the thing as far as he was concerned was to get his Land Bill passed and his Catholic University Bill, both of which he meant to carry through, and get through his term of office as peaceably as was possible. He did not expect the Government to last out longer than October 1903.

“We talked also on the larger aspects of Imperialism, and he agreed with me that the violences done in connection with South Africa, necessary as perhaps they were, had had an ill effect on our national character, and that it might well happen that personal freedom and strict legality would both suffer here in England in consequence. I have been reading Stowe’s Chronicle of the reign of Henry VIII, and I reminded George of the destruction in a very few years of both freedom and legality, and how it had ruined the character of Englishmen to the extent that at the close of the reign each nobleman was ready to betray his fellow-conspirator, and each Bishop to recant his heresies, and each gentleman condemned to death to beg abject pardon of his King for having opposed him as if for a crime.

“2nd June.—Peace has been signed at Pretoria. The country is thoroughly war sick, and I hope will so remain during my lifetime. King Edward was determined to have an end put to the fighting before his coronation, and I fancy the Boers have had better terms given them than people are aware of, and that the peace has been arrived at over Chamberlain’s head and Milner’s. Talking of Chamberlain on Thursday, George said of him that his character was completely misunderstood by the public, who, judging by his face, thought him a cool, unimpassioned calculator. He was just the reverse, being rash and impulsive in his decisions, to a great extent a political gambler, anything but a safe man to be at the head of affairs. George is beginning to learn things now he is in office.

“3rd June.—Madeline Wyndham took me to tea at Apsley House with her son Guy and his wife and stepdaughter, a pretty child just out. The Duke and Duchess showed us all over the house from garret to cellar, or rather to the underground chamber, where the plate is displayed in huge glass cases. The old Duke must have had a passion for silver plate, for every crowned head seems to have presented him with some, the most magnificent being the gift of the Portuguese Government. This last includes thirty-two dozen silver dinner plates. It is unfortunately all of a date which leaves its value something less than the weight of the metal, though the Portuguese is better than the rest, enormous pieces of preposterous design of the time of George IV, practically unusable. There is something melancholy in such a vast display for every one except the head butler, who has the proud charge of it. The Duke and Duchess, however, take a full interest in it all, and explained everything in detail to us very amiably. They are excellent people, he rather stiff and formal as becomes the representative of his great ancestor, whose half whisker he imitates; she a good-natured soul, and both without pretension. They have only succeeded to their kingdom within this last year. Upstairs the great ballroom is a really fine thing, hung with a few good pictures and many bad ones, the best the ‘Velasquez’ obtained in Spain, and a sweet little religious picture of two panels, I know not by whom; it is called an Albert Dürer. We had tea in the garden under the old thorn trees just in full blossom. An interesting visit.

“4th June.—To bid good-bye to Rowton at his house in Berkeley Square. He has been very ill, and is going away on a sea-voyage to the Cape and back, which he thinks will set him right. I hope, indeed, it may, for I have a considerable affection for him. His rooms, which had been newly cleaned and decorated, looked bare and uncomfortable. He complained of having no one to look after him or hang his pictures, or arrange his furniture—the misery of never having married. ‘You see me,’ he said, ‘in my sixty-fourth year, and I have never proposed to any woman in the way of marriage, and there is no one who will care whether I live or die.’ He has been through a terrible time, having one of his ribs cut out by Bennett at St. George’s Hospital. ‘It was a question of life or death in twenty-four hours, and I said “Do it.”’ He asked me what I had myself felt when at the point of death, and I told him, ‘A great indifference.’ ‘It was the same with me,’ he said, ‘I did not care which way it might go.’ It is strange to see a man with so many friends yet apparently so little loved. There is nobody who looks after him, no woman who spends her time with him, not even a nurse, nobody he thinks that loves him. This must be terrible. Neither has he any religion to give him a false hope, nor even a belief in his own philanthropic work. His nearest thing to a creed is his worship of his old master, Disraeli.

“Then I went on to see John Dillon, and had a long talk about Ireland. He is rather sceptical of George Wyndham’s Nationalist sympathies, and says that he is putting the Coercion Act in force more vigorously in some ways than Arthur Balfour did formerly. He gives hard labour now as well as imprisonment, with a view to disqualifying men from serving on County Councils. Dillon also talked much about the peace in South Africa, as to which his views are much the same as mine. He was pleased at my calculation that each Boer, man, woman, and child annexed will have cost the British Government just £1.000. He talked strongly of the ineptitude of the Liberal leaders in the House of Commons.

“Had tea with Princess Louise of Schleswig-Holstein, whom I had met at Clouds in the autumn. She is living in a very small house in Queensbury Place, which she has decorated with an enormous Union Jack in honour of the peace. With her I found an old friend, Mary Hughes, her lady-in-waiting, and a visitor, one Landon, who has been ‘Times’ correspondent for the last five years in South Africa. Landon gave us a long account of the origin and rise of the war, which was extremely interesting. Inspired by the Princess’s sympathy, who interjected at every mention of a Boer or of a pro-Boer, ‘He ought to have been shot—he ought to have been hanged,’ he unfolded all his budget, and let us into many secrets. ‘I am perhaps,’ he said, ‘the only man who has ever ventured to ask Mr. Chamberlain directly, whether he knew of the Jameson Raid before it happened. I had myself known it was intended nearly a year before, as it was talked of quite openly at Johannesburg as due to take place at the end of the year, and it did in fact take place on the 31st of December. Mr. Chamberlain, in answer to my question, said, ‘Well, I was consulted as to what would be the attitude of the Government in the case of a bona fide popular rising at Johannesburg, and my answer was that if it was bona fide the High Commissioner would be instructed to intervene to restore order, and of course that would have meant by the forces of the Crown.’ ‘As a matter of fact,’ Landon explained, ‘the raid as nearly as possible succeeded. What hindered its success was that the Johannesburgers could not make up their minds what flag they should hoist, the Union Jack or the flag of a Republic, and they had agreed to send a Commissioner to Cape Town to settle this question, and while they were awaiting the answer Jameson grew impatient, for his men got tired of doing nothing, and were drifting away from him, and he resolved to risk the coup. Jameson was always a gambler. When he was making £2,000 a year as a Doctor, he used to lose £1,000 and £1,500 a night at cards, and he treated the raid in the same gambler’s spirit. He had 500 men still with him, in another week he would have had only fifty, and he played his stake. If the Johannesburgers could have made up their minds, they could have got possession of the fort and with it of the whole situation, for all the ammunition, artillery, and supplies of the Transvaal were there, and there were only seven men to guard it. The thing might have been done quite easily. As it was it failed through Jameson’s folly. He ordered the advance in spite of seventeen telegrams he received ordering him to stop, including one from the Queen. ‘Yes,’ said the Princess, ‘Grandmama has several times told me long before it happened, that she only hoped to be spared living to see another war in South Africa.’

“Landon also told us about the part Schreiner had played in what he called ‘the black week.’ Schreiner had up to that time been the trusted leader under Hofmeyr, of the Bond, but he had the wit, Landon said, to see that the defeat of the British armies would oblige England to destroy the Dutch Republics, and he came over secretly to Milner. It was this that prevented a general rising in Cape Colony, for all trusted Schreiner, and when he advised against it the Dutch followed him. He spoke of the Orange State as a model of good Government, honest in all branches of its administration, and on good terms with the English Government. I pushed him to say what reason there was for the war, which he avowed was forced on by our side. He said it was one entirely of racial ascendancy, and that if matters had been left alone for a few years more, the Dutch would have become predominant in South Africa. When I further asked what harm there would have been in that, his reply was that a Dutch Government would have been a corrupt one, after the fashion of the South American Republics. I walked back with him as far as Hyde Park Corner.

“10th June.—A lecture by Yeats at the Clifford’s Inn Hall in explanation of his theory of recitation. As an entertainment it was excellent, as he had got three ladies who recited admirably to the accompaniment of the psaltery invented by Dolmetsch, who himself took the chair at the meeting and explained everything musically. Yeats, however, was far from convincing me that the method was either new or good as a way of reading poetry, indeed it reduced the verse to the position it holds in an opera libretto. It was impossible to distinguish whether the words were sense or only sound, and the whole effect depended on the reciter.

“11th June.—With Neville to another lecture to hear Bernard Shaw defend his position as a Socialist (especially as to the part he had taken against the Boers in the late war). It was a very clever performance, for he is a brilliant and ready speaker full of paradox and ingenious jesting, but it was clear his socialist audience was not much with him, and it was impossible to take his doctrines seriously. To me the Fabian position has nothing to recommend it. It is socialism without the few humanitarian virtues which commonly go with it, without romance and without honesty of principle, only opportunism.

“15th June (Sunday).—Newbuildings. Yeats is here with others, and we had an afternoon of poetry, but all agreed that Yeats’ theories of recitation were wrong, useful only for concealing indifferent verse. When he recites it is impossible to follow the meaning, or judge whether the verse is good or bad. All the same he is a true poet, more than his work reveals him to be, and he is full of ideas, original and true, with wit into the bargain. We all like him.

“I am trying to dramatize one of the Cuchulain episodes for Yeats to bring out next year in his Cuchulain cycle of plays at Dublin [‘Fand’].

“23rd June.—The whole of London is decorated for the Coronation, the line of the processions being barricaded with stands for spectators, covered with red cloth. Though the decorations are not generally in the best taste, the general effect is gay, and the grime of London is clothed and put out of sight. Very few modern buildings are not improved by being faced with scaffolding. Immense crowds parade the streets, and traffic is blocked.

“24th June.—A bolt has fallen from the blue. The King is ill, has undergone an operation, and the Coronation is postponed.” [So little was the misfortune expected that the King and Queen had been photographed, robed and crowned in anticipation. I have one of these photographs by me still. There never was so dramatic a misfortune.]

“25th June.—Called at Dorchester House to write my name down for Princess Hélène, who with her husband represents the King of Italy at the Coronation, and at 35 Park Lane to give Lettice her wedding gift and the Sonnet I have written her. I found her with Lord Beauchamp, her fiancé, a good looking, smooth faced young man, who complained much of the deception that had been practised on the public in regard to the King’s illness. Passing through the Park I found Rotten Row crowded, not a trace of trouble on any face, though the newspapers talk of general gloom. On the contrary, streets are full of gay sightseers, satisfied to look at the decorations since there will be nothing more. Returning after dark I found the Park still crowded, but almost exclusively by lovers who occupied each bench in pairs reposing, according to the naïve London custom, in each other’s arms.

“5th July.—The day of our horse sale. I am camped at Caxtons very pleasantly. As a social function all went off most prosperously. Five hundred and ninety people had accepted invitations, and some five hundred sat down to luncheon. Also the quality of the guests was exalted—Princess Louise, the Sultan of Perak with a turbaned suite, Pertab Singh, Maharajah of Idar with the same, some twenty Colonial big wigs, including Barton, Prime Minister of the new Australian commonwealth, and a fair show of our own Lords and Ladies. My health was proposed by Lord Egerton, and I made a rather longer speech than usual in reply. There was no hitch in any of the arrangements, and all the world was pleased. The sole thing wanting was the presence of buyers for the horses. It was the worst sale we have had in all our twenty years, as last year’s was the best.

“10th July.—Newbuildings. Hilaire Belloc came to see me and stayed to dinner. He is a very clever fellow, a good talker, and a powerful wine drinker, as his book, ‘The Path to Rome,’ indicates. (I had not met him since sometime in the eighties, when he came as an Oxford undergraduate to consult me on a plan he had of bringing out a Catholic magazine.) We had an amusing evening trotting out paradoxes.” [This entry records Belloc’s arrival to take up his residence in Shipley, who was afterwards to prove so good and interesting a neighbour to me for so many years.]

“13th July (Sunday).—Labouchere and his wife and daughter, Bill Gordon and Sibyl Queensberry are here (Newbuildings) for a Sunday visit. Labouchere in the highest possible form, brimming over with wit and good stories, the most brilliant talker in England, now Oscar Wilde is gone. Gordon, too, is no bad talker on his own subjects. Labouchere is to retire from Parliament at the dissolution, and has bought Michael Angelo’s Villa at Florence, where he means to live. He is busy pulling the Villa about ‘to suit it,’ he says, ‘to modern requirements,’ uprooting old trees in the podere and planting new ones. About this vandalism, as about all else, he is shamelessly amusing. ‘Old Michael,’ he explained, ‘didn’t understand how to make a house comfortable, it’s time we should teach him.’ His daughter tells me he is a model father, always in good humour, and never scolding her. Indeed he is full of private kindnesses in spite of his public ferocity, and they are a very happy family. I like them all. We sat up till half-past one last night, and he must have told quite a hundred stories and nearly all new. To-day Belloc joined us at dinner, and proved too talkative for Labouchere, who would not compete with him.”

“The Duke of Norfolk’s undeveloped son is dead, and Meynell, whom I saw on Friday was full of anecdotes about him, tragical enough, from his birth, which when it happened was considered an event of the extremest significance in all the English Catholic world, down to this drear conclusion. Perhaps the most pathetic incident was when he was on pilgrimage at Lourdes to which place they repeatedly went in search of a miracle for him. As the ducal party approached the shrine they found themselves face to face with a crowd of joyous French peasants chaunting in honour of a cure which had just been wrought, and the verse of the psalm they were singing was ‘He hath filled the hungry with good things, but the rich he hath sent empty away.’ ‘We shall have no miracle,’ said the Duke, and the Duchess burst into tears. The boy as he grew up had a beautiful face, but he had no mind, and he never learnt to speak. The only words he knew were ‘Pretty boy, pretty boy,’ which he had heard strangers say who came to see him, and he repeated these when he became excited mechanically. His father spent several hours every day with him, but he did not know his father, except as a playfellow, and when the Duke came back from his campaign in South Africa the boy had clean forgotten him. This was a sad wound to the Duke. The Duke, some think, will never remarry. He considers that he resisted a vocation when he did not become an Oratorian, and that he was accursed for this in his son by Heaven. He is more likely to end his days as a priest. The little Lord Arundel is to be buried to-day.

“14th July.—Lord Salisbury has resigned, and is succeeded as Prime Minister by Arthur Balfour. This has disappointed the extreme Imperialists who have been intriguing for the last four years for Chamberlain, but I think Balfour will be found just as uncompromising a Jingo as the other; however, it makes for morality in England, and so on the whole I am glad.

“The Tower of St. Mark’s at Venice has fallen, its foundation probably undermined by the wash of the steamers and the dredging of the canals.

“21st July.—There are to be changes in the new Cabinet, Hicks Beach has resigned and Lord Cadogan, so George Wyndham will get his step whether he stays in Ireland or not.”

The first fortnight of August was spent by me in making my annual driving tour, this time through East Sussex, and afterwards for a month at Fernycroft, writing my play, “Fand,” with other poetry. I find nothing of political importance in my diary for many weeks. In November I was for a week at Gros Bois and Paris, where I found everything in a state of political quiescence, all that was being talked of being a certain growth of Socialism. On the 22nd, being about to start finally for Egypt, I went to see George Wyndham in Park Lane, and he gave me a full account of his plans for Ireland. Next session he is to bring in a bill to deal finally with the land question on the basis of compulsory purchase, aided with English credit. He has got a majority, and more than a majority of the Irish landlords to agree to it, and thinks he can carry it through at a cost, if I understand him rightly, of about seventy millions. The extreme cost he put at £120,000,000, the security for which from the English taxpayer is to be got out of the Public Aids given to the local rates, which will be stopped if the tenants of the County aided fail to pay their yearly rent. He intends to deal very liberally with the readjustment of the financial relations of England with Ireland, and the money thus paid annually to Ireland will be the security of the Land Purchase settlement. Lastly, he will endow a Catholic University. I asked him what he thought would be the outcome of all this if it was effected, Home Rule or a closer Union. He admitted that it would probably lead to Home Rule, but said it was not his business to look so far ahead. Indeed if he carries out all he talked of he will have done enough for one man. As to coercion, he said his revival of it was the price he had had to pay for obtaining a free hand from his colleagues in the Cabinet. He had made large use of the London press, and the support of the “Times” could only be bought by coercion. George was in his most sanguine and optimist vein, and felt certain of success. We were interrupted at this point, and he promised to look in on me at Chapel Street in the afternoon. This he did, but we were no longer alone, and the Irish talk was not renewed.