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 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE 
 
 Ex Libris 
 ISAAC FOOT 1 

 
 C.
 
 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
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 Seven Ages. Imp. i6mo, cloth gilt. Illustrated 
 by HAROLD PJFFARD. Price 6s. 
 
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 the Conquest of Peru. Crown 8vo, cloth. 
 With Frontispiece by STANLEY L. WOOD. Price 6s. 
 
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 of tbe Diamond Fields. Crown 8vo, cloth. 
 Illustrated by E. F. SHERIE. Price 33. 6d. 
 
 LONDON 
 C. ARTHUR PEARSON LIMITED
 
 "ALMIGHTY GOD, OF THY GOODNESS, GIVE ME LIFE AND LEAVE ONCE 
 TO SAIL AN ENGLISH SHIP ON YONDER SEA ! " 
 
 (.See page 54.) 
 
 Frontispiece.
 
 MEN WHO HAVE 
 MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 GEORGE GRIFFITH 
 
 '" 
 
 THIRD EDITION 
 
 LONDON 
 C. ARTHUR PEARSON LIMITED 
 
 HENRIETTA STREET, W.C. 
 1899
 
 DA
 
 Go 
 
 THE GLORIOUS MEMORY 
 
 OF 
 THE MIGHTY DEAD 
 
 AND TO 
 THE HONOUR OF THE LIVING 
 
 WHO ARE 
 
 CARRYING ON THEIR NOBLE WORK, 
 
 THE FOLLOWING PAGES 
 
 ARE INSCRIBED.
 
 " Fair is our lotO goodly is our heritage ! 
 (Humble ye, my people, and be fearful in your mirth !) 
 For the Lord our God Most High 
 He hath made the deep as dry, 
 
 He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the earth ! " 
 
 A SONG OF THE ENGLISH
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 I. PAGE 
 
 WILLIAM THE NORMAN . , , . .1 
 
 II. 
 
 EDWARD OF THE LONG LEGS , 
 
 III. 
 
 THE QUEEN'S LITTLE PIRATE . . . 39 
 
 IV. 
 
 OLIVER CROMWELL . , . 7 1 
 
 V 
 
 WILLIAM OF ORANGE . . . , -97 
 
 VI. 
 
 JAMES COOK . , . t , . Iiy 
 
 VII. 
 LORD CLIVE , , i . . 143 
 
 VIII. 
 
 WARREN HASTINGS . . . . 169 
 
 ix
 
 x CONTENTS 
 
 IX. PAGE 
 
 NELSON ....... 193 
 
 X. 
 
 WELLINGTON . . .223 
 
 XI. 
 
 "CHINESE GORDON" ..... 249 
 
 XII 
 CECIL RHODES . . . 279
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 BY STANLEY L. WOOD 
 
 "ALMIGHTY GOD, OF THY GOODNESS, GIVE ME LIFE AND 
 LEAVE ONCE TO SAIL AN ENGLISH SHIP ON YONDER 
 
 SEA ! " . . . . Frontispiece 
 
 HE DROVE THE GOOD STEEL THROUGH MAIL AND FLESH 
 
 AND BONE .... Facing p. 10 
 
 DUKE WILLIAM ROARED OUT THAT HE WAS ALIVE 1 7 
 
 EDWARD GRIPPED THE WOULD-BE MURDERER . 30 
 
 THEY CARRIED HIM DOWN TO THE BOATS . 53 
 
 HE SWOOPED WITH HIS CAVALRY ROUND THE REAR OF 
 
 THE KING'S ARMY . . . Facing p. 83 
 
 HE HALTED HIS ARMY . . . AND SANG THE HUNDRED 
 
 AND SEVENTEENTH PSALM . . Facing p. 94 
 
 MADE HIM REEL IN HIS SADDLE . . 112 
 
 xi
 
 xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 " MEN OF ENNISKILLEN, WHAT WILL YOU DO FOR ME ? " 
 
 HE CRIED ..... Facing p. 113 
 
 MISSED HIM AND KILLED ANOTHER MAN BEHIND HIM 
 
 Facing p. 141 
 
 INSTEAD OF CHARGING THEY TURNED ROUND AND MADE 
 
 LANES THROUGH THE ARMY BEHIND THEM Facing p. 158 
 
 HIS ENEMY WENT DOWN WITH A BULLET IN THE RIGHT 
 
 SIDE ..... Facing p. 185 
 
 NELSON AT COPENHAGEN . . . ,,214 
 
 THE ORDER THAT SENT THE BRITISH LINE STREAMING 
 
 DOWN FROM THE RISING GROUND . Facing p. 246 
 
 THE LONELY MAN WHO STOOD ON THE RAMPARTS 
 
 OF KHARTOUM .... Facing p. 275 
 
 THAT HISTORIC INDABA IN THE MATOPPOS . 300
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 THE Epic of England has yet to be written. 
 It may be that the fulness of time for writing 
 it has not come yet, or it may be that Britain is still 
 waiting for her Homer and her Virgil. Perhaps the 
 matured genius of a Rudyard Kipling, that strong, 
 sweet Singer of the Seven Seas, may some day 
 address itself to the accomplishment of this most 
 splendid of all possible tasks, and then, again, it 
 may be that it is his only to sound the prelude. 
 That is a matter for the gods to decide in their 
 own good time, but this much is certain that when 
 this work has been worthily done the world will 
 hear echoing through the ages such a thunder-song 
 as has never stirred human hearts before. 
 
 It will begin, doubtless, with the battle-cries of 
 the old Sea-Kings of the North, chanted to the 
 music of their churning oars and the rush and 
 roar of the foam swirling away under the bows of 
 their longships, and from them it will go on ringing 
 and thundering through the centuries, ever swelling 
 in depth and volume as more and more of the races 
 of men hear it rolling over the battle-fields of con- 
 
 xiii
 
 xiv FOREWORD 
 
 quered lands, until at last as every loyal man of 
 English speech must truly hope the roar of the 
 Last Battle has rolled away into eternal silence, and 
 north and south, east and west, the proclaiming of 
 the Pax Britannica heralds the epoch of 
 
 "The Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World." 
 
 But in the meantime, while we are waiting for the 
 coming of the singer whose master-hand shall blend 
 the song and story of Britain into an epic worthy of 
 his magnificent theme, materials may be gathered 
 together, old facts may be presented in new lights, 
 and the great characters who have played their parts 
 in the most tremendous drama that has ever occupied 
 the Stage of Time may be re-grouped in such fashion 
 as will make their subtler relationships more plain, 
 and all this will make the great work readier to the 
 hand of the Master when he comes. 
 
 It is a portion of this minor work that I have set 
 myself here to do. The making of a nation and 
 the building of nations up into empires is, humanly 
 speaking, the greatest and noblest work that human 
 hands and brains can find to do, for the making of 
 an empire means, in its ultimate analysis, the sub- 
 stitution of order for anarchy, of commerce for 
 plunder, of civilisation for savagery in a word, 
 of peace for strife. 
 
 Now, the British Empire as it stands to-day is 
 unquestionably the greatest moral and material Fact 
 in human history, and hence it is permissible to
 
 FOREWORD xv 
 
 assume that the makers of it must, each in his 
 own way, whether of peace or war, have been the 
 greatest empire-builders the world has yet seen, and 
 it is my purpose here to take the greatest of these 
 and tell with such force and vividness as I may, the 
 story of the man and his work. I am not going to 
 write a series of biographies arranged in prim chrono- 
 logical ranks, nor am I going to confine myself to 
 the narration of collated facts so dear to the hearts 
 of educational inspectors and scholastic examiners. 
 Such you will find already cut and dried for you in 
 the school-books and in many ponderous tomes, 
 from the reading of which may your good taste 
 and good sense deliver you ! 
 
 I shall seek rather to show you the living man 
 doing the living work which his destiny called him 
 to do. The man will not always be found of the 
 best, nor the work, seemingly, of the noblest, but 
 what I shall seek to show you is that the work 
 had to be done in order that a certain end might be 
 accomplished, and that the man who did it was, all 
 things considered, the best and, it may be, the only 
 man to do it. In so far as I do not do this I shall 
 have failed in the doing of my own work. 
 
 One more word seems necessary in order to antici- 
 pate certain possible misconceptions. Our empire- 
 making is not yet complete, even at home. The 
 centuries of strife during which the hammering and 
 welding together of the nations which now make 
 up the United Kingdom has been progressing
 
 xvi FOREWORD 
 
 have naturally and necessarily left certain national 
 jealousies and antipathies behind them, and the 
 last thing that I should desire would be to arouse 
 any of these. 
 
 There are two kinds of patriotism, a smaller and 
 a greater, a National and an Imperial. Both are 
 equally good and noble, and it is necessary that the 
 first should precede the second. But it is equally 
 necessary that it should not supersede or obscure 
 it, and it is to this later and greater, this Imperial 
 patriotism that I shall appeal, and I would ask my 
 readers, whatever their nationality, to remember 
 that on the burning plains of India and the rolling 
 prairies of Canada, in the vast expanses of the 
 Australian Bush and the African Veld, there are 
 neither Englishmen nor Scotsmen, Welshmen nor 
 Irishmen ; but only Citizens of the Empire, brothers 
 in blood and speech, and fellow- workers in the build- 
 ing up of the noblest and stateliest fabric that human 
 hands have ever reared or God's sun has ever shone 
 upon.
 
 I 
 
 WILLIAM THE NORMAN, 
 
 PIRATE AND NATION-MAKER
 
 WILLIAM THE NORMAN 
 
 IT may strike those of my readers who have only 
 got their history from their school-books as 
 somewhat strange that I should begin my record 
 of British Empire-Makers with a man whom they 
 have been taught to look upon as a foreigner, an 
 invader, a conqueror, and a ruthless oppressor of 
 the English. 
 
 The answer is simple, though manifold. The 
 school-books are only filled with potted facts, and 
 are therefore wrong and unreliable. It has been 
 well said that England was made on the shores 
 of the Baltic Sea and the German Ocean. The 
 so-called Englishmen who occupied it at the time 
 of the Conquest were not Englishmen at all, for 
 the simple reason that the true English race had 
 yet to be born, and, after it, the true British. 
 
 The England and Scotland of the eleventh 
 century were peopled, not by nations, but by 
 tribes mostly at bitter and constant war with each 
 other. There were still Jutes and Angles, Picts
 
 4 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 and Scots, Danes and Swedes and Norwegians, 
 each occupying their own little stretch of country, 
 and governed, more or less effectually, by their 
 chieftains, in proof of which it is enough to recall 
 the fact that Harold's last fight but one was 
 against his own brother, who had come across 
 the Narrow Seas at the head of a miscellaneous 
 crowd of hungry pirates to steal as much as he 
 could of the ownerless heritage that Edward the 
 Confessor had left behind him. 
 
 A good deal of sentiment, more or less born of 
 deftly-written romances, has glorified the memory 
 of this same Harold. Whether it was deserved 
 or not does not concern us now, any more than 
 does his right or unright to the throne of England. 
 It is enough here to grant him all honour as an 
 able leader of armies, and a man who knew how 
 to snatch victory from defeat, and glory from 
 disaster by dying like a hero surrounded by the 
 corpses of his foes. 
 
 The idle question whether he or William had 
 the better right to the crown of England may be 
 left to those who care for such quibbling. Let 
 us, at the outset, in the words of the Sage of 
 Chelsea, "clear our minds of cant." There is no 
 "right" or "wrong" in these things, saving only 
 the eternal right of the strongest and wisest the 
 fittest or most suitable, in short, to wield power 
 and dominion whether the less fit like it or not. 
 The peoples are thrust headlong into the fiery
 
 WILLIAM THE NORMAN 5 
 
 crucible of War, and, on the adamantine anvil of 
 Destiny, the Thor's Hammer of Battle beats and 
 crushes them into the shape that God has designed 
 for them. It seems a rude method, but in many 
 thousands of years we have found no other, so 
 at least we may conclude that it is the best one 
 known. 
 
 There is a very deep meaning in the seemingly 
 flippant and almost impious saying of Napoleon : 
 "God fights on the side of the biggest battalions." 
 He does but you must reckon the bigness of the 
 battalions, not only by their numbers, but by the 
 value of their units, remembering always that one 
 man with a stout heart and a cause he honestly 
 believes in is worth a score who have neither heart 
 nor faith. 
 
 Just such a man was William the Norman, son 
 of Robert the Magnificent, otherwise styled the 
 Devil, and Arlette the Fair, daughter of Fulbert 
 the Tanner of Falaise. It is in this birth of his 
 that we find the first clue to his real greatness. 
 He was born of a union unhallowed by the 
 sanction of the Church, among a people proud 
 beyond all modern belief of their royal sea-king 
 ancestry. 
 
 How did he come to achieve this almost miraculous 
 triumph over a prejudice and hostility of which we 
 can now form but a very dim idea ? 
 
 We have to look no farther than his cradle to 
 find the answer. Lying there, the little fellow used
 
 to grasp the straw in his baby fists with such a grip 
 that it could not be pulled away from him. The 
 straw broke first, and ever in his after life what 
 William the Norman laid hold of he held on to ; 
 and that is why he became the first of our Empire- 
 Makers. 
 
 No doubt it was the strain of the old pirate blood 
 which ran so strongly in his veins that made him 
 this. If we have successfully cleared our minds of 
 cant, we shall see plainly that, since all nations 
 begin in piracy of some sort, it is natural to expect 
 that the best pirates will prove the best Empire- 
 Makers. That old strain is, happily, not yet ex- 
 hausted. When it is, Great and Greater Britain 
 will be no more. 
 
 Few men have passed unscathed through such 
 a stormy youth as his was. When he was seven 
 years old his father, Duke Robert, having exacted 
 an oath of unwilling fealty from his under-lords to 
 his bonny but base-born heir, went away on a 
 pilgrimage to Jerusalem from which he never 
 returned, leaving him to the wardship of his 
 friend, Alan of Brittany ; and soon after Duke 
 Robert's death became known Alan was poisoned. 
 After that for a dozen years the boy Duke was 
 in constant peril of his life. 
 
 One night two lads were lying sleeping side by 
 side in the castle of Vaudreuil, and in the silence 
 and darkness of the night one of the Montgomeries, 
 bitter enemies of the Lords of Falaise, to whose
 
 WILLIAM THE NORMAN 7 
 
 hate Alan of Brittany had already fallen a victim, 
 crept up to the bedside with a naked dagger, and 
 drove it blindly into the heart of one of the boys 
 and fled. 
 
 Young Duke William he was only a lad of 
 twelve then woke up to find himself wet with his 
 playmate's blood, but all unknowing then how 
 nearly the history of the world had come to 
 being changed by that foul and happily mis- 
 directed dagger-stroke. Had it found his heart 
 instead there would have been no Norman Con- 
 quest, no blending of the two strains of blood 
 from which has sprung the Imperial Race of earth, 
 no British Empire, no United States of America 
 without all of which the world would surely 
 have been very different. 
 
 Seven more years of plot and intrigue, of strife 
 and turmoil, young Duke William lived through 
 after this, growing ever keener in mind and 
 stronger in body, and, as we may well believe, 
 hardening into the incarnation of ruthless and yet 
 wisely-directed Force which was so soon to make 
 him a power among men. Before he was twenty 
 he shot his arrows from a bow which no other 
 man in his dukedom could bend, and he was 
 already a finished knight, a pattern of the gentle- 
 man of his age, good horseman, good swordsman, 
 gentle towards women and stern towards men, 
 pure in his morals and moderate in his living ; a 
 good Christian according to his lights and the
 
 8 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 ideas of his day, and above all faithful to the ideals 
 that he had set before himself. 
 
 Already at nineteen that is to say in the year 
 1044 not on ty na d he shaped his plans for re- 
 ducing the disorder of his turbulent dukedom to 
 discipline, but he had made his designs so manifest 
 that the lawless lords and robber barons could see 
 for themselves how stern a master he would make 
 as in good truth he did and the deadly work of 
 conspiracy started afresh. One night when he was 
 sleeping in his favourite castle of Valognes, Golet, 
 his court fool, came hammering at his bedroom 
 door with his bauble, crying out that some traitor 
 had let the assassins into the stronghold. He leapt 
 out of bed, huddled on a few clothes as he ran to 
 the stable, mounted his horse, and galloped away 
 all through the night toward Falaise along a road 
 which is called the Duke's Road to this day. No 
 sooner was he safe across the estuary of the Oune 
 and Vire and in the Bayeux district than he 
 pulled his dripping, panting horse up in front of 
 the church of St. Clement, dismounted and knelt 
 down to say his prayers and thank God for his 
 merciful deliverance. Such was the youth who 
 was father to the man justly styled William the 
 Conqueror. 
 
 It was not long after this 'that the years of 
 intrigue and plotting ended in armed revolt. Guy 
 of Burgundy, William's kinsman and once his play- 
 mate, looked with greedy eyes on the fair lands
 
 WILLIAM THE NORMAN 9 
 
 of Normandy. He was master of many provinces 
 already, and among his hosts of friends there were 
 not a few of William's own under-lords, in whose 
 breasts still rankled the shame of owning a bastard 
 for their master. To his side came the Viscount 
 of Coutance, Randolph of Bayeux, Hamon of 
 Thorigny and Creuilly, and that Grimbald of 
 Plessis whose hand was to have slain William 
 that night in Valognes, and in the end this long- 
 gathering storm burst on the grassy slopes of 
 Val-es- Dunes. 
 
 Master Wace the Chronicler, in his " Roman de 
 Rou," gives us a brilliant little picture of that long- 
 past scene where the future Conqueror won his 
 spurs of many a brave and gallant gentleman 
 clad cap-a-pie in shining mail, seated on mighty 
 chargers impatiently pawing the ground, of long 
 lances gay with fluttering ribbons tied on by dainty 
 hands that morning, of waving plumes and flaunting 
 pennons, and mild-eyed cattle grazing knee-deep in 
 the long wet grass in peaceful ignorance of the 
 bloody work that was about to be done. 
 
 But with all this we have little to do, and one 
 episode must suffice. The starkest warrior among 
 the rebels was Hardrez, Lord of Bayeux, and he, 
 like many another, had sworn to slay William that 
 day with his own hands. The oath had proved 
 fatal to others before it did to him, but at length 
 his turn came. Youngr Duke William saw him 
 
 O 
 
 from afar, and with lance in rest made for him at
 
 io MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 a gallop. One of the knights who had followed 
 Hardrez to battle charged at him in mid-course. 
 The next moment horse and man went rolling in 
 the grass, and William, dropping his splintered 
 lance, drew his sword, and, the Lord of Bayeux 
 coming up at the instant, he drove the good steel 
 with one shrewd, strong thrust through mail and 
 flesh and bone, and Hardrez never spoke again. 
 
 That stroke won William his dukedom, and the 
 Chronicler, though a man of Bayeux himself, tells 
 in stirring lines how the young lord and his faithful 
 knights hunted the flying rebels off the field and 
 rode them down like sheep. 
 
 This was not the last fight that William had for 
 the mastery of his own land, but it left his hands 
 free to begin the work that he had set himself to 
 do, and he did it. To him unity was strength, and 
 he was ready to go to any lengths to get it. His 
 methods then, as afterwards in England, were 
 severe we should call them brutal nowadays, but 
 these days are not those. 
 
 When the citizens of Alenc_on defied him they 
 indulged in the pleasantry of hanging raw hides 
 over the walls and beating them, shouting out the 
 while that here there was plenty for the tanner's 
 son to do. He set his teeth and swore his 
 favourite oath by the Splendour of God that 
 they should have work enough ere he had done 
 with them. When the city lay at his mercy he had 
 two-and-thirty of the humourists sent out to him,
 
 HE DROVE THE GOOD STEEL THROUGH MAIL AND FLESH AND HONK. 
 
 (Page 10.)
 
 WILLIAM THE NORMAN 11 
 
 and cut off their ears and noses and hands and feet, 
 and had them tossed over the walls as a sort of hint 
 that he was not quite the kind of person who could 
 appreciate jokes about his ancestors. It was an 
 inhuman deed, but history records no other public 
 aspersions of the good name of Duke William's 
 mother. 
 
 Yet one more battle the young Duke had to fight 
 before he crossed the Narrow Seas to the famous 
 field of Senlac. Henry of France, his titular over- 
 lord, and Geoffrey of Anjou, jealous of the fast- 
 growing power of Normandy, united their forces in 
 an expedition which was half an invasion and half 
 a plundering raid. Duke William, with infinite 
 patience, and a quiet, marvellous self-restraint, held 
 his own fiery temper and the angry ardour of his 
 knights in check, watching the invaders burn town 
 after town and village after village, and turning 
 some of his fairest domains into a wilderness. 
 
 He never struck a blow until, one fatal afternoon, 
 he swooped down from Falaise and caught the 
 French army severed in two by the rising flood of 
 the river Dive. Then he struck, and struck hard, 
 and when the bloody work was over, Henry was 
 glad to buy a truce and his liberty from his vassal 
 with the strong castle of Tillieries and all its lands, 
 and so heavy hearted was he at his defeat that, as 
 the Chronicler tells us, " he never bore shield or 
 spear again." 
 
 Normandy had now become the most orderly
 
 12 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 and best governed country in Europe. Robbers, 
 noble and otherwise, were ruthlessly suppressed, 
 and the poorest possessed their goods in peace, 
 while William himself had time to turn his thoughts 
 to the gentler, and yet not less important, concerns 
 of policy and love-making. 
 
 The old story of his courtship of the fair Matilda 
 of Flanders with a riding whip is evidently a myth 
 manufactured by some Saxon enemy, for Duke 
 William was in the first place a gentleman, and, 
 moreover, the lady and her parents were as anxious 
 as he was for the marriage, seeing that he was now 
 the most desirable of suitors. The truth is that the . 
 Church opposed their union on some shadowy 
 grounds of consanguinity, and it did not take place 
 until after a courtship of four years. 
 
 And now, having got our pirate Duke happily 
 married and seen him undisputed lord of his own 
 realm, we may go with him to St. Valery on the 
 coast of Ponthieu and watch him working and 
 praying and offering~ T gifts at the old shrine, during 
 those fifteen long days that he watched the weather- 
 cocks and prayed for the south wind that was to 
 waft his fleet and army over to the English shore. 
 
 It was on Wednesday, the 27th of September, 
 that the wind at last veered round. The eager 
 soldiery hailed the change as the granting of their 
 prayers and the consent of Heaven to the beginning 
 of their enterprise, and flung themselves into their 
 ships like a great host of schoolboys setting out on
 
 WILLIAM THE NORMAN 13 
 
 a holiday. Soon the grey sea was covered with 
 a swarm of craft, and it must have seemed as 
 though the old Viking days had come back as the 
 great square sails went up to the mast-heads, and 
 the shining shields were hung along the bulwarks. 
 
 William himself, in his golden ship Mora, the 
 present of his own dear Duchess, led the way with 
 the sacred banner of the Pope at his mast-head, 
 and the three Lions of Normandy floating astern. 
 The Mora was lighter heeled or lighter loaded than 
 the rest, for when morning dawned she was alone 
 on the sea with the Sussex shore in- plain sight. 
 But presently a great forest of masts and clouds of 
 gaily-coloured sails rose up out of the grey waters 
 astern, and the whole vast fleet came on, urged by 
 oar and wind, and by nine o'clock that morning the 
 fore-foot of the Mora, close followed by her 
 consorts, struck the English ground in Pevensey 
 Bay. 
 
 It has often been told how William, as he landed, 
 stumbled and fell on his hands and knees, and how 
 those near him cried out that it was a fatal omen. 
 The story may be myth or fact, but nothing could 
 be more characteristic of the true man than his 
 springing to his feet with both hands full of sand 
 and laughing out in that great voice of his : 
 
 " Nay, by the Splendour of God, not so. See ! 
 Have I not taken seizin of my new kingdom and 
 lawful heritage ? " 
 
 But the army of the so-called English, that they
 
 H MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 had come to seek was nowhere to be found, and some 
 days were spent in uncertainty and debate as to 
 whether they should march on London or await 
 battle on the shore with their sea communications 
 open, and in the end they took the latter and the 
 wiser course. 
 
 Meanwhile, as has been said, Harold was away 
 in the North fighting and beating his brother 
 Tostig and his fellow robbers, and the news of Duke 
 William's landing was flying northward to him. It 
 must have been something of an anxious time for 
 both the Norman waiting day after day in that 
 deadly inaction which is most fatal of all things to 
 the courage and discipline of an army, and Harold 
 hurrying southward at the head of his victorious 
 troops, knowing that he was about to try conclusions 
 with the best leader and the finest soldiery in 
 Europe. 
 
 It is of little import here and to us now which of 
 them had the best right, as the lawyer-quibble has 
 it, to that which they were about to fight for. The 
 point is that such claims as either had they were 
 going to submit to the stern and final ordeal of 
 battle and in good truth a stern ordeal it proved 
 to be. 
 
 As he came to the South the standard of Harold 
 the Fighting Man was joined by troops of re- 
 cruits attracted by the fame of his northern victory, 
 and it was a great and really formidable army 
 which at length assembled between London and
 
 WILLIAM THE NORMAN 15 
 
 the Sussex coast. Meanwhile the Normans, after 
 the fashion of the pitiless warfare of those days, 
 were dividing their time between the building of 
 entrenched camps and ravaging, plundering, and 
 burning throughout the pleasant Southern land. 
 
 Of course messages and parleyings passed be- 
 tween them. Harold from his royal house at 
 Westminster bade Duke William come and fight 
 him for his capital and his kingdom, to which Duke 
 William warily replied : " Come and drive us into 
 the sea if you can ! " This at length King Harold 
 was forced to attempt. And so it came to pass 
 that, at length, on the i4th of October, the hosts 
 of the Saxon and the Norman confronted each 
 other on the field of Senlac by Hastings, on the 
 morrow to strike blows whose echoes were to ring 
 through many a long century, and to do deeds more 
 mighty in their effect than either Harold or William 
 dreamt of. 
 
 The Norman host has been called a horde of 
 mailed robbers and cut-throats, eager only for 
 plunder, and the Saxon army has been almost 
 canonised as a band of heroes, gathered together 
 to die in defence of their native land and their 
 lawful king. Yet, strangely enough, the robbers 
 and cut-throats spent the best part of the night 
 confessing their sins and praying for victory, as 
 well as in making the best dispositions to attain 
 it. The patriots spent the same hours feasting 
 and drinking, and swaggering to each other about
 
 16 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 the brave deeds they had done in the North and 
 the greater things they were going to do on the 
 morrow. 
 
 So the night passes, and the morning dawns grey 
 and chill on the two now silent hosts Then from 
 the Norman ranks rises the solemn cadence of the 
 Te Deum, and as this dies away the archers move 
 out forerunners of those stout yeomen whose 
 clothyard shafts were one day to win Cre^y and 
 Agincourt. Then come the footmen with their 
 long pikes, and after them the mailed and mounted 
 knights, in front of whom rides Taillefer Iron- 
 Cutter and Minstrel tossing his sword into the 
 air and catching it, and singing the while the Song 
 of Roland and Roncesvalles. As the archers and 
 pikemen spread out in skirmishing order he sets 
 spurs to his horse and charges at the Saxon line. 
 He kills two men, and then goes down under the 
 battle-axe of a third. 
 
 Then the arrows flew fast and thick, and charge 
 after charge was made upon the palisades of stakes 
 that fenced the Saxon position, high above which 
 floated the Dragon Standard of Wessex and the 
 banner of the Fighting Man. 
 
 But the double-bladed Saxon axes were no play- 
 things, and they were swung by strong and strenuous 
 arms, and every time the Norman front came up to 
 the breastwork it was hewn down in swathes by the 
 deep-biting blades. The arrows fell blunted and 
 broken on the big Saxon shields and stout Saxon
 
 DUKE WILLIAM RCARED OUT THAT HE WAS ALIVE. 
 (Page 17.)
 
 WILLIAM THE NORMAN 17 
 
 armour, and so Duke William, with that ever-ready 
 resource of his, bade his archers shoot up into the 
 air, and then down from the grey sky there fell a 
 rain of whirring, steel-pointed shafts, one of which, 
 winged by Fate, struck gallant Harold in the eye- 
 doubtless as he was looking up wondering at this 
 new manoeuvre and, piercing his brain, laid him 
 lifeless in the midst of his champions. 
 
 Soon after this a cry went up that Duke William 
 too was dead, and he, hearing this, tore off his 
 helmet a somewhat unsafe thing to do in such a 
 fight and roared out that he was alive, swearing 
 as usual by the Splendour of God that the land of 
 England should yet be his by nightfall. 
 
 So they laid on again. William's horse went 
 down under a pike-thrust. He clove the pike-man 
 to the chin and asked one of his knights to lend 
 him his horse. The knight refused, thinking more 
 of his skin than his loyalty, whereupon William 
 pitched him out of the saddle, swung himself up, 
 and led another charge against the ever-dwindling 
 ring of heroes who were still hammering away with 
 their battle-axes and this time the stout line 
 wavers and breaks ; the mail-clad warriors pour up 
 the slope, shouting that the day is won ; axe and 
 sword ring- loud and fast on helm and mail, the 
 
 5 7 
 
 Saxons reel back, closing round the body of their 
 king and the staff of his banner. 
 
 " Dex aide ! Dex aide ! Ha-Rou ! Ha-Rou ! " 
 Duke William's men yell and roar again as they 
 
 3
 
 i8 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 scramble over heaps of mangled corpses filling the 
 trenches and blocking the breaches in the palisades. 
 Another moment or two of brief, bitter, and bloody 
 struggle and the last Saxon ring breaks and melts 
 away, and Hastings and England are won. 
 
 What followed is history so familiar that few 
 words more from me will suffice. What Duke 
 William had done in his own land he did after 
 the same methods in the land that had been the 
 Saxons'. Cruel, bloody, and savage they were 
 beyond all doubt, but it is a question whether, 
 even in the doing, they were more disastrous than 
 the ferocious anarchy and the unceasing plunder 
 and outrage and murder that had disgraced the 
 weak and divided rule of the Saxon kings. In 
 their effect they were a thousandfold better. Duke 
 William believed that order was Heaven's first law, 
 and, by whatever means he had at hand, he was 
 honestly determined to make it earth's as well. 
 And he succeeded, which after all is not an un- 
 satisfactory test of honest merit. How well he did 
 so let us ask, not one of his own chroniclers or 
 troubadours, but the man who wrote the story of 
 his own conquered people, and this is what he will 
 tell us : 
 
 " Truly he was so stark a man and wroth that 
 no man durst do anything against his will. Bishops 
 he set off their bishoprics, and abbots off their 
 abbacies, and thanes in prison. And at last he did 
 not spare his brother Odo. Him he set in prison.
 
 WILLIAM THE NORMAN 19 
 
 Betwixt other things we must not forget the good 
 peace that he made in this land, so that a man that 
 was worth aught might travel over the kingdom 
 unhurt with his bosom full of gold. And no man 
 durst slay another though he had suffered never so 
 mickle evil from the other." 
 
 Such was this grim, stern, Thor's- Hammer of a 
 man, who by his strength and cunning hewed into 
 shape that which in after days was to become the 
 corner-stone of the glorious, world-shadowing fabric 
 which we call the British Empire.
 
 II 
 
 EDWARD OF THE LONG LEGS 
 
 "BURY ME NOT TILL YOU HA VE CONQUERED SCOTLAND"
 
 II 
 
 EDWARD OF THE LONG LEGS 
 
 TWO centuries all but nine years have passed 
 away since William the Conqueror, unwept, 
 if not unhonoured, lost his life in avenging a paltry 
 joke, and left his work for others to carry on. 
 In the two centuries not much has been done, 
 although no little show has been made meanwhile, 
 and a great clash of arms has resounded through 
 the world. 
 
 William the Red has died, as he lived, in a some- 
 what ignoble and futile manner. Henry I. has 
 done one good thing, wedding, as it were, in his 
 own person and that of the Lady Matilda, the two 
 races which were afterwards to be one. 
 
 Stephen and Matilda have settled their differences 
 and died, after the shedding of much wasted blood. 
 Henry II., by the hand of Strongbow and his 
 licensed pirates, has done a piece of good work 
 badly in beginning that conquest of Ireland which 
 is not to be completed until the Battle of the 
 Boyne is lost and won. 
 
 Richard Lionheart has won much glory to very
 
 24 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 small profit in the magnificent madness of the Third 
 Crusade. The barons, recognising, however dimly 
 and clumsily, that they are, in good truth, citizens 
 of the infant State whose lusty, turbulent youth 
 already gives promise of its future strength and 
 greatness, have become law-lords as well as land- 
 lords, and with mailed hands have guided that un- 
 willing pen of John's along the bottom of the parch- 
 ment on which the Great Charter is written. 
 
 And, lastly, Simon of Montfort has taken a swift 
 stride through several centuries and, arriving at the 
 modern idea that the making of nations and the 
 ordering of the world can be achieved by Talk, has, 
 after not a little violence and the spilling of con- 
 siderable blood that might have been better spent, 
 got together that first Parliament or Talking- 
 Machine, whose successors have so sorely hindered 
 the progress of the world and balked the efforts of 
 those appointed by God, and not by the counting of 
 noses, to do its work. 
 
 So the two noisy and somewhat foolish centuries 
 have rolled away into a blessed oblivion with a good 
 deal of shouting and swaggering, of strife and blood- 
 shed, but of little progress, saving that one Roger 
 Bacon has lived and written a certain book and 
 made himself a name for ever. 
 
 But all this time the work with which we are 
 here most concerned, the making of an empire, has 
 been waiting for the next God-sent man to come 
 and do it, and this man was Edward Plantagenet,
 
 EDWARD OF THE LONG LEGS 25 
 
 surnamed Longlegs, next in lineal succession, not 
 as king, but as Empire-Maker, to him who won 
 the fight at Senlac and got himself so well obeyed 
 that "no man durst do anything against his will" 
 which was a great deal to say of any one in such 
 days as those. 
 
 Edward of the Long Legs came on to the stage of 
 History with long, swift, determined, and, in short, 
 wholly characteristic strides. The Talking-Machine 
 of the good Earl Simon had worked noisily, as is 
 usual with such machines, and had produced little 
 but sound and fury. 
 
 There was war all round, and the usual anarchy 
 in Ireland and Wales. Llewelyn, Lord of Snow- 
 don, for instance, had pitted himself gallantly 
 against the logic of circumstances, and was seeking 
 to reconstruct the ancient and now impossibly obso- 
 lete Celtic empire. 
 
 "Be of good courage in the slaughter, cling to thy 
 work, destroy England and plunder its multitudes!" 
 his bards had sung to him, and so he had honestly 
 set himself to do, not recognising the fact that 
 empires are neither made nor re-made by mere 
 methods of miscellaneous blood-letting. 
 
 To the north, Scotland was divided by schisms 
 and rent by the bitter jealousies of its nobles and 
 clan-chieftains, savage, rude and poor, but gallant, 
 strong, and very full of fight, as the English were 
 to learn later on. 
 
 Over the Narrow Seas the wide domains which
 
 26 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 William the Norman had kept with his sword and 
 which the second Henry had greatly increased by 
 inheritance and marriage, were slipping piecemeal 
 away from the throne to which they did not of right 
 divine belong, and with which it was therefore im- 
 possible that they should remain. 
 
 Such, in briefest outline, was the scene into which 
 Edward Longlegs strode, and of which he was to 
 be for thirty-five years the central and dominating 
 figure. His first look round, as it were, showed 
 him the nature of the task which it was his destiny 
 to forthwith set about. 
 
 With that clearness of vision without which no 
 man has any chance of success in the business of 
 empire- making, he instantly pierced the dust-storms 
 of battle that were rising all about him, and the 
 mist-clouds of debate which Earl Simon's Talking- 
 Machine had commenced to vomit forth, and behind 
 and beyond these he saw a certain Fact, a prime 
 necessity which had to be faced in short a real 
 Something of an infinitely greater importance than 
 tribal warfare, the aspirations of bard-inspired 
 princelings, or even parliamentary debates. 
 
 This was neither more nor less than the fact that, 
 when the Maker of all things mapped out this part 
 of the world, it pleased Him in His wisdom to put 
 England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland into one 
 little group of islands, and from this fact Edward 
 Longlegs drew the deduction that the King of 
 Kings had intended them to be under one lordship.
 
 EDWARD OF THE LONG LEGS 27 
 
 It seems a simple thing to say now, a fact so 
 patent that the mention of it seems superfluous. 
 So does the larger fact that the world is round ; 
 but it was a very different matter in the times and 
 circumstances of Edward Longlegs, and, indeed, his 
 first and greatest claim to stand next in succession 
 to William the Norman in the royal line of empire- 
 makers consists in this : that he was capable of that 
 master-stroke of genius which clearly demonstrated 
 an imperial principle of which six hundred years of 
 history have been the continuous and emphatic 
 endorsement. 
 
 No sooner was the bloody fight of Evesham over 
 and the good Earl Simon had breathed out his 
 generous, if somewhat premature soul in that last 
 cry of his: "It is God's grace!" than Edward 
 Longlegs seems to have set himself to prepare for 
 the task that was to be his. He was not to be 
 king in name for some seven years more, but as the 
 historian of the English People with great perti- 
 nence remarked : " With the victory of Evesham, 
 his character seemed to mould itself into nobler 
 form." In other words he was, perchance uncon- 
 sciously, performing that indispensable preliminary 
 to all really great and true public reforms, the 
 reformation of himself. 
 
 Hitherto his life had been none of the best. He 
 had been the leader of a retinue that had made 
 itself something like infamous in the land. He had 
 intrigued first with one party and then with another.
 
 28 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 He is accused of a faithlessness which, it is said, 
 forced the good, though mistaken, Earl Simon into 
 armed revolt against his liege lord though this 
 may, after all, only have been a stroke of wise and 
 necessary policy, since he possibly saw even then 
 that Chaos would not reform itself into Cosmos just 
 for being talked at. 
 
 Then again, and with curious resemblance to 
 William of Normandy, and later of Hastings and 
 England, he had avenged an insult to his mother 
 by the slaughter of some three thousand men in the 
 rout of Lewes and a quite unjustifiable indulgence 
 in pillage and slaughter when the Barons' War was 
 finally over. 
 
 " It was from Earl Simon," says John Richard 
 Green in one of those limpid sentences of his, " as 
 the Earl owned with a proud bitterness ere his 
 death, that Edward had learnt the skill in warfare 
 which distinguished him among the princes of his 
 time. But he had learnt from the Earl the far 
 nobler lesson of a self-government which lifted him 
 high above them as ruler among men." 
 
 It seemed, indeed, as though, by this reformation 
 of himself, he was to typify that reformation of 
 England which it was his life-work to begin. The 
 new Edward was to be the maker of the new 
 England. 
 
 His first action after the war was characteristic of 
 the man and the work that he was to do. The 
 cessation of the fighting, as was usual in those days,
 
 EDWARD OF THE LONG LEGS 29 
 
 had left an undesirable number of truculent warriors 
 of various ranks wandering at large about the 
 kingdom with their legitimate occupation gone. 
 Edward, with that instinct of order characteristic 
 of all true empire-makers, saw in these the possi- 
 bilities of disorder, and with a happy combination 
 of wisdom and adventure turned their swords and 
 lances away from the bodies of their fellow-citizens 
 by taking them to fight the Paynim in the Holy Land. 
 
 An incident of this excursion has been adorned 
 by one of those pleasant fictions which, if the 
 paradox may be pardoned, are none the less true 
 for the fact that they are false. Edward, having 
 sent certain hundreds of Moslems to Paradise with 
 a perhaps unnecessarily ruthless dispatch, was con- 
 sidered by the sect of the Assassins to be a person 
 who would be better dead than alive in Palestine, 
 and so one of them, after several attempts, suc- 
 ceeded, as one may put it, in interviewing him 
 privately with a poisoned dagger. The fiction has 
 it that his consort, Eleanor of Castille, sucked the 
 poison from the wound with her own sweet lips and 
 so saved his life. 
 
 It is a pretty story, but, unfortunately for its 
 authenticity, no one seems to have heard of it or 
 thought it worth the telling until Ptolemy of Lucca 
 told it a good half-century afterwards. But the 
 truth underlying it remains, and this truth is that 
 Edward Longlegs was blessed with that greatest of 
 all earthly blessings, a loving and devoted wife.
 
 30 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 The facts of the matter are few but eloquent. 
 Edward saw the dagger before it struck him, and 
 gripped the would-be murderer with a grip worthy 
 the muscles of Lionheart himself. There was a 
 struggle, during which the dagger-point scratched 
 his arm. A moment after it was buried in the 
 assassin's own heart. Then some of Edward's 
 retainers, hearing the scuffling, burst into the tent 
 and satisfied themselves that the wretch had 
 attempted his last murder by the somewhat super- 
 fluous method of knocking out his brains with a 
 foot-stool. 
 
 Soon after this symptoms of poisoning showed 
 themselves, and Edward, in his usual business-like 
 way, made his will and his peace with God and 
 prepared to "salute the world" with becoming 
 dignity. In the end not Eleanor's lips but the 
 surgeon's knife removed the danger, and so once 
 again a dagger-thrust which had come near to 
 changing the history of Britain missed its mark. 
 
 It was during his return from this Crusade, as he 
 was journeying through Calabria, that he met the 
 messengers who told him that his father was dead 
 and that he was King of England. Charles of 
 Anjou, who was riding with him at the moment, 
 wondered at the great grief he showed, and, being 
 himself a man almost incapable of feeling, asked him 
 why he should show more grief at his father's death 
 than he had done for the loss of his baby son 
 who had died a short time before. The answer 
 was to the point and worthy of the man.
 
 EDWARD GRIPPED THE WOULD-BE MURDERER. 
 (Page 30.)
 
 EDWARD OF THE LONG LEGS 31 
 
 "By the goodness of God," he said, "the loss 
 of my boy may be made good to me, but not 
 even God's own mercy can give me a father 
 again." 
 
 It was on the same journey that there occurred 
 that curious incident which is called the " Little 
 Battle of Chalons," and which is also instructive 
 in giving us another view of the man who could 
 use such wise and pious words as these. While he 
 was travelling through Guienne, the Count of 
 Chalons, one of the best and starkest knights of 
 his age, sent a friendly message to request the 
 favour of being allowed to break a lance with him. 
 Edward, though he had been repeatedly warned 
 of plots against his life by those who had designs 
 on his French dominions, and though as a king 
 he had a perfect righ't to decline the challenge 
 of a vassal, was, as we should say nowadays, too 
 good a sportsman to say no ; but he took the 
 precaution of going to the knightly trysting-place 
 with an escort of a thousand men in doing which 
 he was well justified by the fact that the Count 
 of Chalons was there waiting for him with about 
 two thousand. 
 
 During the trouble which inevitably followed, the 
 Count of Chalons did break a lance with Edward, 
 but it was his own lance, and this failing, he gripped 
 him round the neck in the most unknightly fashion 
 and tried to drag him from the saddle. The Count 
 was a strong man, but Edward was a little stronger,
 
 32 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 so he just sat still, and swinging his horse round, 
 pulled him out of the saddle instead, after which, 
 to put it into plain English, he gave him a sound 
 thrashing, and when he at length cried for quarter, 
 Edward, ever generous in the moment of victory, 
 gave him the life that he had forfeited by his 
 treachery, but, as a punishment, which the 
 coroneted scoundrel justly deserved, he compelled 
 him to take his sword back from the hands of a 
 common soldier, and so disgraced him for ever in 
 the eyes of his peers. 
 
 It may be added that the Little Battle of Chalons, 
 in spite of the difference of numbers, ended in 
 something like a picnic for the English, after which 
 the king betook himself in leisurely fashion to the 
 throne, and the work that was waiting for him. 
 
 No sooner was the crown upon his head, than 
 he got to his task. The Prince of Snowdon, now 
 calling himself Prince of Wales, had not only made 
 himself master of his own country, but had 
 pushed the war into England and reduced several 
 English towns, the chief of which was Shrewsbury. 
 Edward called upon him to restore the peace which 
 he had broken, and to come and do homage for his 
 lands. Llewelyn, in the plentitude of his pride, 
 told him to come and fetch him. 
 
 Edward took a note of this, but waited two years 
 while he replenished the royal treasury by more 
 or less justifiable means. During this time, as 
 it happened, the Prince's promised bride, Eleanor,
 
 EDWARD OF THE LONG LEGS 33 
 
 daughter of Earl Simon, fell into his hands. Again 
 and again he summoned the Prince to perform the 
 act of allegiance, holding his sweetheart meanwhile 
 as a hostage in honourable captivity. 
 
 At length a fresh defiance from the Welshman 
 roused him to action, and Longlegs strode swiftly 
 across England and struck out hard and heavy. A 
 single blow dissipated the dream of Celtic empire 
 for ever. Llewelyn fled to his mountains and at 
 length sued for peace. By rights his life was forfeit 
 for rebellion, yet Edward not only forgave him but 
 remitted the fine of ,50,000 which he had imposed 
 on the Welsh chieftains, and then invited Llewelyn 
 to his court and married him with all due pomp and 
 circumstance to the daughter of his old enemy 
 from which it will be seen that Edward Longlegs, 
 like William the Norman, and indeed all good and 
 capable empire-makers, was a gentleman. 
 
 Unhappily, Llewelyn repaid the kindness and 
 courtesy by new rebellion, which ended, as it 
 deserved, in disaster. Merlin had prophesied that, 
 when money was made round, a Welsh prince 
 should be crowned in London. During this last 
 revolt Edward had caused round halfpence and 
 farthings to be coined. When it was over the 
 head of Llewelyn was sent to London and crowned 
 with a garland of ivy on Tower Hill. 
 
 What Longlegs had thus done with Wales he 
 sought by more devious and less effective means 
 to do with Scotland. The dispute between Balliol 
 
 4
 
 34 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 and Bruce gave him the opportunity of intervention, 
 and of this the dismal results are too well known to 
 need detailed description at this time of day. 
 
 Here, again, we have nothing to do with personal 
 right or wrong, or with the ethics of national in- 
 dependence. The business of empire-making is too 
 urgent to wait for matters of this kind. It would 
 perhaps have been better if Edward, after the sack 
 and slaughter of Berwick, had hurled the whole 
 weight of the English power against the object of 
 his attack, as William the Norman would have 
 done, and once and for all crushed the opposition 
 into impotence. 
 
 It would have been bitter and bloody work, as 
 the work of empire-making is apt to be, but the 
 end might have justified the means. Certainly 
 some centuries of bloodshed and bitterness would 
 have been saved. The high ideal of a United 
 Kingdom would have been realised nearly five 
 hundred years earlier, and the progress of both 
 realms in civilisation, wealth, and power might 
 have been quickened immeasurably. 
 
 And after all, neither side in the long struggle 
 would have lost anything worthy of being weighed 
 against the greatness of the gain to both. There 
 would have been no Stirling Bridge, but then 
 there would have been no Falkirk ; no Bannock- 
 burn, but also no Flodden Field. All this, as it 
 happens, however, was not written in the Book of 
 Destiny, and so it does not concern us here, since
 
 EDWARD OF THE LONG LEGS 35 
 
 we have to consider how much of the work of 
 empire-making Edward did, not what he failed to 
 do or left undone. 
 
 The surrender of Stirling in 1305 apparently 
 completed the conquest of Scotland, and Edward 
 was for the time being the actual and undisputed 
 sovereign of the whole country from the Pentland 
 Firth to the English Channel, and it is probable 
 that the conquest would have been a permanent 
 one but for the entrance of another power into 
 the field, and this was nothing less than the 
 English Baronage itself. It was as though the 
 chiefs of his own army had turned against him, 
 and, in the fatal dispute which followed, Robert 
 the Bruce saw his opportunity, and in the end 
 re- won for Scotland that independence which has 
 cost her so much and which, however precious as 
 a matter of sentiment, was destined to prove of 
 so little value to her. 
 
 All that is past and done with now, but still no 
 one who holds that an empire is greater than a 
 nation, even as the whole is greater than its part, 
 can help looking back with regretful thoughts upon 
 those pages of our history which would have been 
 so much brighter and more glorious if those gallant 
 Scots who fought through those long and bitter wars 
 could have stood, as they have done since, side by 
 side with their brothers of the South, and so made 
 possible centuries ago the beginning of that great 
 work in which they have borne so splendid a part.
 
 30 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 Had that been so Edward Longlegs might have 
 been the founder instead of only one of the makers 
 of the British Empire, and that last piteous scene 
 by the sandy shores of the Solway Firth would 
 never have been enacted. 
 
 But though in the end he neither conquered 
 Scotland nor founded the United Kingdom, he 
 did something else which, as the centuries went 
 by, proved but little less important, for he began 
 to make the British Constitution. 
 
 Gallant soldier and great general as he was, he 
 was perhaps an even greater statesman. He saw 
 far ahead of his times, too far indeed, for in his 
 enlightened conviction that in the matter of taxa- 
 tion "what touched all should be allowed of all" 
 we have the real reason for that revolt of the 
 Baronage, which made a United Kingdom of the 
 Fourteenth Century an impossibility. 
 
 Yet as law-maker he did work which lasted 
 longer than that which he did on the battle-field. 
 Like William the Norman, he was a stark man 
 who knew how to get himself obeyed, and order, 
 no matter how dearly bought, was the first thing 
 to be got, and he got it. He could "make a 
 wilderness and call it peace," as he did over and 
 over again with Wales and Scotland and, indeed, 
 to him a wilderness was better than a place where 
 disorder dwelt but he also made another peace 
 within his own realms which was the first fore- 
 runner of that which we enjoy to-day. The laws
 
 EDWARD OF THE LONG LEGS 37 
 
 which he made were for rich and poor, great and 
 small, alike. The hand that was pitiless in 
 destruction was also ready and strong to protect. 
 
 The manner of his death is as characteristic as 
 any of the acts, good or bad, of his life. Old 
 and weak and sick, he made the long journey from 
 Westminster to the Solway to fulfil the oath which 
 he had sworn at the knighting of his unworthy son 
 to avenge Bruce's murder of Comyns and to punish 
 his rebellion. 
 
 Too feeble to keep the saddle, he was carried 
 in a litter at the head of the hundred thousand 
 men who were to be the instruments of his 
 vengeance, but at length the news of victory after 
 victory won by the Bruce stung him to a fury which 
 for the time was stronger than his weakness, and at 
 Carlisle the old warrior left his litter and once more 
 mounted his charger. It is a pathetic sight even 
 when looked at through the mists of the intervening 
 centuries. We can picture the gallant struggle that 
 he must have made to sit his horse upright and to 
 bear without fainting the weight of the armour that 
 was oppressing his disease-worn and weary limbs. 
 The mailed hand which had struck the great 
 Count of Chalons down could not now even draw 
 the sword that hung useless at his side. 
 
 Only one thing remained strong in the man who 
 had once been the very incarnation of strength. 
 His inflexible will was still unbroken and unswerv- 
 ing in its devotion to the great ideal and master-
 
 38 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 project of his life. Had that will had its way, the 
 flood of English strength and valour that was rolling 
 slowly behind him would have burst in a torrent of 
 death and desolation over the war-wasted fields of 
 southern Scotland, and there can be but little doubt 
 as to what the end would have been. 
 
 But it was not to be. The Spectre Horseman 
 was already riding by his side, and, like the wine 
 from a cracked goblet, the dregs of his once splendid 
 strength ebbed away. . At last the skeleton hand 
 was outstretched, and he who had never been un- 
 horsed by mortal foe was stricken from the saddle. 
 Yet even then the proud spirit refused to yield. 
 He took his place in the litter again. With almost 
 dying lips he ordered the army forward ; and, though 
 the end was very near, he did not submit without a 
 struggle, pathetic in its hopeless heroism, to conquer 
 even Death itself and carry out his purpose in spite 
 of the King of Terrors. Die he must, and that 
 soon, but his spirit should live after him and he 
 would still lead his army. 
 
 "Bury me not till you have conquered Scotland!" 
 were almost the last words he spoke. Though they 
 were disobeyed and Scotland was never conquered, 
 yet they were well worthy of the iron-hearted man 
 who said them.
 
 Ill 
 
 THE QUEEN'S LITTLE PIRATE 
 
 " THE MASTER-THIEF OF THE NEW WORLD"
 
 Ill 
 
 THE QUEEN'S LITTLE PIRATE 
 
 A NOTHER couple of centuries with a few 
 X~\ added years have slipped away, and the 
 next scene of the slowly-unfolding drama opens on 
 the sea instead of the land. The Idea which 
 Edward of the Long Legs had so clearly conceived 
 and so very nearly realised, the idea that the 
 frontiers of the United Kingdom of which he 
 had dreamt should be its sea-coasts has all the 
 time been growing and deepening, for, like all 
 ideas which faithfully reflect some fact in the 
 universe, it could not die, and was bound some 
 day to become a fact itself. 
 
 Politically, England and Scotland were still inde- 
 pendent kingdoms, but many old differences had 
 been forgotten and forgiven, and they had come a 
 great deal closer, as it was fitting that they should 
 do on the eve of their final union. Moreover, they 
 were one in their dread and hatred of that cruel 
 and implacable Colossus which, with one foot on 
 the East and the other on the West, bestrode
 
 42 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 the world, drawing vast treasures from hidden El 
 Dorados with which it built countless ships, and 
 hired and armed innumerable men for the enslave- 
 ment of mankind. For now we have reached 
 those "spacious times of great Elizabeth," when 
 that lusty young giant of Liberty, recently born 
 into the world, was girding on his armour, and 
 making him ready to grapple with the powers of 
 oppression and darkness which were just then most 
 fitly incarnated in the shape of Spain. 
 
 It is almost impossible for us of the present day 
 to understand clearly what the Spain of those days 
 was. She was the first naval and military Power 
 in the world, her ships and armies were everywhere, 
 her wealth was honestly believed to be illimitable, 
 and moreover she was the recognised champion 
 of the Catholic Church, whose spiritual thunders 
 mingled with the roar of her guns, and which 
 supplemented the terror of her arms by all the 
 diabolical enginry of torture and the awful powers 
 of the Holy Office. 
 
 The world, in short, was on the eve of great and 
 marvellous doings on the one hand so terrible in 
 their deadly earnestness and tremendous conse- 
 quences, and on the other so fantastically splendid 
 in their almost superhuman daring and undreamt-of 
 rewards, that it looked as though the Fates were 
 preparing some gigantic miracle wherewith to 
 astound mankind. And so, in sober truth, they 
 were, and the miracle about to be wrought was
 
 THE QUEEN'S LITTLE PIRATE 43 
 
 the making of what we now call the British 
 Empire. 
 
 In the beginning of the latter half of the six- 
 teenth century there was a yellow-haired, blue-eyed, 
 round-faced and sturdily-built youngster sailing to 
 and fro as ship's boy in a tiny cockle-shell of a 
 craft plying with the humbler kinds of merchandise 
 between the Thames and the coasts of France and 
 Flanders. Whether or not he had heard any of 
 those wondrous stories which the western gales 
 were wafting across the Atlantic from the golden 
 Spanish Main we do not know, but probably he 
 had, and, like many another sailor-lad of his day, 
 he had dreamt wild dreams of blue seas and bright 
 skies, of white- walled cities crammed with gold, and 
 of stately galleons staggering across that mysterious 
 sea stuffed to the deck with the treasures they were 
 bringing to pour into the coffers of the King of Spain. 
 
 And yet, wild as these dreams may have been, 
 they would have been commonplace in comparison 
 with the bewildering exploits with which this same 
 blue-eyed sailor-lad was one day to realise and 
 excel them. For this was he whose name the 
 mariners of Spain were soon to hear shrieked out 
 by the voice of the tempest, booming in the roar 
 of guns, and echoing through the crash of battle. 
 This, in a word, was Francis Drake El Draque, 
 the Dragon, child and servant of the Devil himself, 
 Scourge of the Church and Plunderer of the 
 Faithful.
 
 44 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 As I say, he may or may not have heard the 
 story of the Golden West, but it is quite certain 
 that he did hear much of the black and terrible 
 tales which the refugees and exiles from France and 
 the Netherlands had to tell, for not a few of them 
 crossed over in the little barque in which he served, 
 and he could not fail to hear what they had to say 
 of the murders and massacres, the torturing and 
 outrage with which Spain was disgracing her 
 knightly fame and her ancient faith. They are 
 horrible enough for us to read even here in the 
 security which that gallant struggle won for us, 
 and now when we can only hear the shrieks of 
 the tortured and the groans of the dying echoing 
 faintly across the gulf of three centuries ; but what 
 must they have been to Francis Drake when he 
 heard them told by those whose eyes had only just 
 before looked upon the hideous reality perhaps 
 indeed by some of those racked and mutilated un- 
 fortunates who had managed to escape with their 
 lives to seek the sheltering hospitality of Gloriana 
 the Queen ? Was it any wonder that deep down 
 in his boyish heart there were planted those seeds 
 of hate and horror which later on were to bear such 
 terrible fruit ? 
 
 The lad Francis seems to have performed his 
 duties as ship's boy as well as he did everything 
 else, whether it was leading the Queen's ships to 
 harry the coast of Spain or raging and storming 
 through one of his piratical raids among the
 
 THE QUEEN'S LITTLE PIRATE 45 
 
 Fortunate Isles of the West, for when his master 
 died he made him his heir, and so Francis became 
 a trader on his own account. For a few years he 
 was just a peaceful shipmaster, making an honest 
 and hard-won living ; but all this time events were 
 arranging themselves in more and more martial 
 array, and the bursting of the storm was not very 
 far off. 
 
 The actual fighting did not begin in the guise of 
 recognised warfare for a very considerable time. 
 Spain and England were at peace, each trying to 
 humbug the other, but between Protestant and 
 Catholic it was otherwise. Armed cruisers manned 
 by angry Protestants made their appearance in the 
 Narrow Seas, and whenever they got a chance fell 
 upon Catholic ships and avenged the sufferings of 
 their fellow-heretics in a fashion at once prompt 
 and pitiless, and this at length so exasperated 
 Philip that he closed his ports to English trade, and 
 Drake's occupation was gone. Better, in truth, had 
 it been for Philip if he had left him undisturbed in 
 his business ! 
 
 He sold his little vessel, went to Plymouth, and 
 entered the service of two kinsmen of his, one of 
 whom was soon to prove somewhat of an empire - 
 maker in his own line and whose name, with 
 certain others soon to be mentioned, was destined 
 to go down to everlasting fame indissolubly linked 
 with that of Francis Drake. This was Captain 
 John Hawkins, and when the young trader reached
 
 46 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 Plymouth he had just come back with a shipload 
 of gold and other precious things from his first 
 venture in slave-trading, and now at least Drake, 
 who was still a lad in his teens, must have heard 
 something of the wonders of El Dorado. Yet, 
 curiously enough, when Captain Hawkins went 
 back he did not go with him. He sailed instead, 
 as a sort of supercargo, in another of Hawkins' 
 ships to Biscay, and there a momentous revelation 
 awaited him, as though to guide him on the path 
 of his destiny. 
 
 At San Sebastian about a score of English 
 sailors, once strong and stalwart men of Devon, 
 crept out of the dungeons of the Inquisition and 
 took passage with him home. King Philip had 
 taken off his embargo now, and these men were 
 the remnant of the crew of a Plymouth ship which 
 he had seized in port when the embargo was laid 
 on. The others had rotted to death during the six 
 months that he had bestowed his hospitality upon 
 them. We can imagine what talks they had on 
 the way home, and no doubt El Draque bore the 
 stories of these forlorn mariners well in mind on 
 that most memorable day when he "singed the 
 King of Spain's beard " at Cadiz. 
 
 John Hawkins came back from his second voyage 
 richer than ever, and now all the mariners of the 
 South Coast were beginning to dream golden 
 dreams which were soon to become yet more 
 golden deeds, and King Philip, to whom all such
 
 THE QUEEN'S LITTLE PIRATE 47 
 
 ventures were the flattest piracy, began to fear for 
 his monopoly and instructed his ambassador in 
 London to drop the hint that foreign trade with 
 the Indies was forbidden, upon which, foolishly 
 enough, or perhaps not knowing their own true 
 strength, Queen Bess's councillors backed down 
 and forbade John Hawkins to start again. 
 
 He, obediently enough, stayed at home, but a 
 certain George Lovell got together an expedition 
 and slipped out to sea, westward bound. With 
 him went Francis Drake, at length to see for the 
 first time the blue waters and green shores of El 
 Dorado. This time, however, it proved anything 
 but golden for him or his companions, for they came 
 back with shattered ships and still worse broken 
 fortunes. They had drawn a blank in the great 
 lottery which half Europe was wanting to gamble 
 in. 
 
 Nothing daunted, he shipped again, this time 
 with George Fenner, bound for Guiana. Again, 
 financially speaking, the voyage ended in disaster, 
 but there was one incident in it destined to bear 
 good fruit. A big Portuguese galleasse, backed up 
 by six gunboats, tried to enforce the prohibition 
 against foreign trade. Fenner had one ship and a 
 pinnace, and with these he fought the " Portugals " 
 and thoroughly convinced them by the logic of shot 
 and steel that he was not the sort of man to be 
 prohibited from doing anything he wanted to do. 
 
 This forgotten action is really one of great im-
 
 48 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 portance. It was Francis Drake's first taste ol 
 fighting, which in itself means a good deal, but it 
 was also the beginning of that lordly and magnifi- 
 cent contempt which the English mariners of that 
 day were soon to feel for all enemies, no matter 
 how strong they might seem. It was this spirit 
 which a few years later was to take Sir Richard 
 Grenville 
 
 "With his hundred men on deck and his ninety sick below," 
 
 into the midst of the fifty-three Spanish ships 
 which he fought for an afternoon and a night before 
 he surrendered so sorely against his will and fell 
 dead of his wounds on the deck of the Spanish 
 flagship. It was this, too, which, when that long 
 seven days' fight against the Armada was raging 
 and roaring up the Channel, brought the flag of 
 the Spanish Rear- Admiral down with a run just 
 because the Little Pirate stamped his foot on the 
 deck of that same Revenge and said that he was 
 Francis Drake and had no time to parley. 
 
 Meanwhile the rumblings of the war-storm in 
 Europe had been growing louder. The Nether- 
 landers were at last turning on their torturers, 
 Darnley had been murdered and Mary Queen of 
 Scots put in prison, so Gloriana, feeling herself 
 somewhat at leisure, took a hand in the next 
 buccaneering expedition. It may be noted here, 
 by the way, that there was no more ardent 
 buccaneer and slave-trader in her dominions than
 
 THE QUEEN'S LITTLE PIRATE 49 
 
 Good Queen Bess herself. She lent ships though 
 she withheld her commission, and her pirates did 
 the rest. If disaster overtook them or if the 
 Spanish Minister raged against their doings she 
 promptly disowned them and felt sorry for her ships. 
 But if they came back happily filled to the hatches 
 with plundered treasure, she took her dividends and 
 lent more ships. 
 
 It was thus with the expedition which sailed out 
 of Plymouth on October 2, 1567, under the com- 
 mand of Admiral John Hawkins, whose second 
 officer was Francis Drake. The diplomacy of the 
 times called it the trading venture of Sir William 
 Garrard and Co., but for all that there were two 
 ships of the Royal Navy in it, the Jesus and the 
 Minion, and the merchandise it carried consisted 
 mainly of cannon and small arms, powder and shot, 
 and cold steel. 
 
 The voyage began with a slave-raiding expedi- 
 tion down the Portuguese coast of Africa, whence 
 with five hundred slaves they crossed to the 
 Spanish Main. Here, after varying fortunes, they 
 filled their ships with treasure, and Hawkins turned 
 his prows northward for home. But while crossing 
 the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico a furious hurri- 
 cane burst upon them and drove his gold-and-pearl- 
 laden vessels so far into it, that he came to the 
 bold decision to put into the Spanish port of Vera 
 Cruz to refit. 
 
 In the harbour he found twelve great galleons 
 
 5
 
 50 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 loaded with gold and silver, waiting for the convoy 
 to escort them to Spain. They were utterly at the 
 mercy of the English ships, but John Hawkins, 
 pirate and slave-dealer, was still an English gentle- 
 man, so he made a solemn convention to leave the 
 treasure-ships alone on condition of being allowed 
 to refit in the harbour. Hawkins was already 
 known in Spain as the " Enemy of God," and Don 
 Martin Enriquez, the new Governor of Mexico, 
 had come out with special orders to abolish him by 
 any means that might be found the readiest. 
 
 Don Martin seems to have thought that in this 
 case treachery would suit best, so he signed the 
 convention and gave his word of honour as a 
 gentleman of Spain that the English ships should 
 be allowed to come and go unmolested. So for 
 three days the work of dismantling went on in 
 peace, and on the fourth, half-disabled as they were, 
 they were attacked. It was a fierce and bloody 
 fight, and it ended in the sinking of four galleons, 
 the wrecking of the Spanish flag- ship, and the 
 killing of five or six hundred Spaniards. 
 
 But on the English side only the Jesus, the 
 Minion, and ti\e Judith got away and, shot-shattered 
 and half-provisioned, began to stagger homeward 
 across the wide Atlantic. On the way the Judith 
 was lost, and took to the bottom with her all the 
 proceeds of many months of trading and fighting 
 and privation. 
 
 So the expedition came back poorer than it went,
 
 THE QUEEN'S LITTLE PIRATE 51 
 
 and Spain laughed aloud, but, as will be seen, some- 
 what too soon. Drake got home first, and no 
 sooner did he land at Plymouth than he took horse 
 for London. It so happened that a little while 
 before Spanish ships carrying a huge amount of 
 money to pay Alva's army in the Netherlands, had 
 been driven into the Thames by the Protestant 
 rovers lately mentioned, and Gloriana, who never 
 liked to let a good thing go, had held on to it on 
 one pretext or another until Drake came hot-footed 
 and angry-hearted to tell of the treachery of Vera 
 Cruz. 
 
 Gloriana wanted nothing better. Her buccaneer- 
 ing venture had been a failure and here was a way 
 of paying herself for the two ships she had risked, 
 so she turned upon the Spanish Ambassador and 
 told him point blank that until the injury done to 
 her "honest merchants" was redressed she would 
 hold the treasure in pledge. Naturally after that 
 not a groat of it ever got to Alva or his soldiers. 
 
 That year, which was 1569, Drake went to 
 Rochelle with Sir Thomas Wynter. The next 
 summer he married Mary Newman, and a month 
 or two later he was again steering to the westward 
 in two little vessels, the Dragon and the Swan. 
 The next year he went again, with the Swan alone, 
 and this time he came back with a certain idea in 
 his head which was magnificent to the point of 
 absurdity. The adventures of the last two or three 
 years had deepened his contempt for Spanish
 
 52 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 prowess, and now he laughingly proposed to go 
 back, not to kill the goose that laid the King of 
 Spain's golden eggs, but to rifle the nest in which 
 they were deposited. This was Nombre de Dios, 
 the strongest city in the New World, and the 
 richest to boot. 
 
 The means employed were, as was usual in this 
 age of wonders, ridiculously inadequate to the end 
 to which they were devoted. Of late years certain 
 bold mariners have sought to win an ephemeral 
 notoriety by crossing the Atlantic in open boats. 
 Francis Drake set out on a serious and momentous 
 expedition to the Spanish Main in the Pasha of 70 
 tons followed by the Swan of 25 that is to say in 
 a couple of fishing-boats. These two cockle-shells 
 were manned by seventy-three men all told, only 
 one of whom had reached the age of thirty. It 
 must have looked more like a parcel of lads going 
 afloat on a holiday spree than an expedition with 
 which all the world was soon to ring. 
 
 There is no space here to tell of all that befel 
 these absurd adventurers on their devious and 
 tedious way to Nombre de Dios, though no 
 romancer ever imagined such a story as their 
 adventures make. So it must suffice to say that 
 on July 29th he started out across the Isthmus of 
 Darien at the head of seventy-three men to attack 
 a strong city as big as Plymouth, and with these 
 he actually fought his way into the town, established 
 himself in the centre of it and held it for some hours.
 
 THEY CARRIED HIM DOWN TO THE BOATS. 
 (Page 53.)
 
 THE QUEEN'S LITTLE PIRATE 53 
 
 If his men had been the seasoned buccaneers of 
 his later raids he would probably have taken it 
 altogether, but they unhappily found in the Gover- 
 nor's house a stack of silver bars twelve feet high, 
 ten feet broad, and seventy feet long. This was a 
 little too much for the nerves of the Devon boys, 
 but Drake would not let them touch it, since the 
 town was not yet theirs. Then a fearful rain-storm 
 came on just about dawn and put out their matches 
 and ruined their bow-strings, and then a terrible 
 misfortune happened. Drake had been severely 
 wounded in the leg, but he had concealed his hurt 
 until the supreme moment came, and then, as he 
 was leading his handful of heroes to the last attack, 
 he went down with his boot full of blood. Some- 
 thing very like a panic now took his men, not for 
 their own sakes but for his. In vain he stormed at 
 them, and cried angrily : 
 
 " I have brought you to the door of the Treasure- 
 house of the World ! Will ye be fools enough to 
 go away empty ? " 
 
 "Your life is more precious to us and England 
 than all the gold of the Indies ! " they replied, and 
 so by kindly force they carried him down to the 
 boats and rowed away, having accomplished per- 
 haps the most splendid failure in history. 
 
 The fame of this exploit instantly echoed through 
 the whole Spanish Main and thence across the 
 Atlantic to Europe. A few days later he avenged 
 his failure at Nombre de Dios by cutting a big ship
 
 54 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 out from under the guns of Cartagena. Then he 
 vanished, leaving no other trace behind him than 
 the poor little abandoned Swan. For the next few 
 months nothing was seen of him, though his hand 
 was felt far and wide along the coast. Spanish 
 store-ships disappeared, dispatch boats were inter- 
 cepted, and coast-towns were raided with bewildering 
 rapidity and effectiveness. 
 
 But all this time the deadly tropical fever was 
 playing havoc with his little handful of men. His 
 brother John died of it, and man after man was 
 struck down till at last, out of the seventy-three 
 who had sailed with him from Plymouth, he could 
 only muster eighteen fighting men when he at 
 length started to plunder the mule-train from 
 Panama. 
 
 On the fourth day of the journey a very memor- 
 able thing happened, for that noon he reached the 
 top of the dividing ridge of the Isthmus, and lo ! 
 there before him, only a few miles away, lay the 
 smooth, shining expanse of the Pacific Ocean, that 
 long-hidden, jealously -guarded sea on which his 
 were the first English eyes that had ever gazed. 
 He did just what such a man would have done in 
 such circumstances. He fell on his knees and, rais- 
 ing his hands to heaven, cried aloud : 
 
 " Almighty God, of Thy goodness, give me life 
 and leave once to sail an English ship on yonder 
 sea!" 
 
 Years afterwards the prayer was granted, and not
 
 THE QUEEN'S LITTLE PIRATE 55 
 
 only did he sail on the Golden Sea, but crossed it 
 while he was making the first voyage that an 
 Englishman ever made round the world. 
 
 Were I writing a book instead of an essay I 
 could tell of the plundering of the mule-trains, of 
 the taking of Vera Cruz where, to the astonish- 
 ment of the Spaniards, he would not allow a single 
 woman or an unarmed man to be hurt and Nombre 
 de Dios, which did not resist him so well the second 
 time. It must, however, be enough to say that 
 this time everything ended happily for the remnant 
 that survived, and that on Sunday morning, August 
 9- X 573> while the good folks of Plymouth were 
 in church, they heard a roar of artillery from the 
 batteries followed by an answering salute from the 
 sea and, straightway quitting their devotions, they 
 ran out to learn the good news that Gloriana's 
 Little Pirate had come back safe at last and well 
 loaded up with plunder. 
 
 His next venture was nothing less than that 
 famous voyage of his round the world, with the 
 fairy-story of which we have here nothing to do 
 save to say that the fame of it, no less than the 
 enormous treasure, the plunder of a hundred ships 
 and a score of towns, with which the poor sea- 
 worn, worm-eaten, wind-weary Golden Hind, stag- 
 gered one Michaelmas morning into Plymouth 
 Sound, at last convinced Queen Bess that in her 
 dear Little Pirate whom, by the way, she had 
 never yet openly recognised she had a champion
 
 56 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 who was worth a good many thousands of King 
 Philip's soldiers and sailors. 
 
 But now the first of Drake's open rewards was 
 to be his. The Golden Hind was hauled on to the 
 slips at Deptford, and Gloriana and her court dined 
 on board. When the dinner was over she bade her 
 Little Pirate kneel before her, touched him on the 
 shoulder with his own sword and bade him rise 
 Sir Francis Drake. The Spaniards, by the way, 
 had another title for him, no less honourable in his 
 eyes, and this was " the Master-Thief of the New 
 World." 
 
 For some considerable time nothing happened 
 beyond the failure of one or two trifling expeditions 
 which failure was Gloriana's fault, and not 
 Drake's and the setting of a price of .40,000 by 
 favour of the King of Spain on the Little Pirate's 
 head an investment of which Drake was soon to 
 pay the dividend in the craft-crowded harbour of 
 Cadiz. 
 
 Meanwhile, matters between England and Spain 
 were going from bad to worse. For a few months 
 unscrupulous intrigue, backed up by wholesale 
 lying, hampered Drake most sorely in the prepara- 
 tion of that great work which was nothing less 
 than the establishment of the sea-power of England. 
 Everything that the fickleness of his mistress, the 
 weathercock support of so-called friends at court, 
 and the still more dangerous machinations of 
 English statesmen in the pay of Spain could do,
 
 THE QUEEN'S LITTLE PIRATE 57 
 
 was done. The fleet, to his unutterable rage and 
 disgust, was even placed on a peace-footing, des- 
 pite the fact that the noise of the Armada's 
 preparations was still sounding across the Narrow 
 Seas. 
 
 But at last, by some means or other, a certain 
 Spanish spy had got himself suspected and 
 stretched on the rack. Now the rack, as an aid to 
 cross-examination, is not an ideal instrument, but it 
 certainly served its purpose this time, for the spy in 
 his torment gave away all the details of a vast 
 scheme which embraced an alliance between 
 France, Spain, and Scotland, together with a 
 general Catholic uprising in England, which was to 
 take place simultaneously with the Triple Invasion. 
 
 Never had England, and with her the cause of 
 liberty, stood in such great and deadly peril. 
 Gloriana at last flung diplomatic dalliance to the 
 winds, stopped her lying and chicanery, kicked the 
 Spanish Ambassador out of the country, and let her 
 Little Pirate loose. Yet even now there was 
 another lull before the storm, and this lull Philip 
 took advantage of to invite a fleet of English corn- 
 ships to his ports, where he seized them to feed 
 that ever-growing sea-monster which he was going 
 to pit against El Draque. 
 
 This settled the matter. Drake, only half ready 
 for sea, put out with every ship that could move for 
 fear more orders would come to stop him and, with 
 an insolent assurance which augured well for the
 
 58 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 great things that he was about to do, actually ran 
 his ships into Vigo Bay and forced the Spanish 
 Governor to allow him to finish his preparations in 
 Spanish waters. Then he turned his eager prows 
 westward, stopping on the way at the Cape Verde 
 Islands to lay waste Vera Cruz and make Santiago 
 a heap of ashes. 
 
 Five years before young William Hawkins had 
 been taken prisoner here and burnt alive with 
 several of his crew, and this was El Draque's way 
 of wiping out the old score. 
 
 Then he sped on again, spent Christmas at Santa 
 Dominica, refitted his ships and refreshed his men, 
 and then fell like a thunderbolt on the famous city 
 of Santo Domingo, the oldest in the Indies, 
 founded by Columbus himself and ruled over by 
 his brother. It was this that the Little Pirate had 
 been preparing for during those other mysterious 
 voyages of his. The blow was as crushing as it 
 was unexpected, and the prestige of Spain in the 
 West never recovered from it. The town was 
 utterly stripped and dismantled by the victors. 
 Fifty thousand pounds in cash, two hundred and 
 forty guns of all calibres, and an immense amount 
 of other spoil was brought away, and the whole 
 fleet, after living at free quarters for a month, sailed 
 southward, completely refitted and re-victualled, as 
 usual, at the Spaniards' expense. 
 
 When the news got to Europe, it was said that 
 Philip had had "such a cooling as he had never
 
 THE QUEEN'S LITTLE PIRATE 59 
 
 had since he was King of Spain." It is both 
 interesting and instructive to learn that not the 
 least part of the booty took the shape of a hundred 
 English sailors who were found toiling as slaves in 
 the Spanish galleys. 
 
 Reinforced by these, Gloriana's Little Pirate 
 crossed the Caribbean Sea and fell on Cartagena, 
 the capital of the Spanish Main, and now the 
 richest city in the Indies. Paralysed by the inso- 
 lence of the attack, it soon fell under its fury and 
 real strength. The booty was enormous, but the 
 moral effect was still greater. The new-born sea- 
 power of England had vindicated itself with trium- 
 phant suddenness, and Drake, having picked up the 
 unfortunate remnants of Raleigh's colony in 
 Virginia the time for colonising not having come 
 yet entered Plymouth Sound again in the Elizabeth 
 Bonaventura at the head of his loot-laden fleet, and 
 reported his arrival, piously regretting that on the 
 way home he had missed the Spanish plate-fleet by 
 twelve hours " for reasons best known to God." 
 
 " A great gap hath been opened which is very 
 little to the King of Spain's liking," was the Little 
 Pirate's own comment on the brilliant achieve- 
 ment which had ushered a new power into the 
 world. He might also have put it another way, 
 and said that with his well-directed shot he had 
 plugged the source whence flowed the golden 
 stream of Spanish wealth, for indeed it was 
 nothing less than this. The Spanish Colossus
 
 60 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 suddenly found itself with empty pockets, Spanish 
 credit was ruined at a single blow, the Bank of 
 Seville closed its doors, and when King Philip tried 
 to raise a loan of half a million ducats, he was 
 flatly refused. 
 
 How hard hit he was may be seen from the fact 
 that instead of hurling the whole strength of his 
 laboriously-prepared Armada on the English coasts, 
 he asked for explanations. Gloriana, with an 
 almost splendid mendacity, disowned her Little 
 Pirate once more and swore she had nothing what- 
 ever to do with him. But this Drake expected, and 
 went on with his own plans, having no doubt 
 honestly paid up the Queen's full share of the 
 plunder. 
 
 A few months more of diplomatic dodgery fol- 
 lowed, and then came the final opening of Gloriana's 
 eyes. A letter stolen from the Pope's own cabinet 
 proved to her beyond all possibility of doubt that 
 the Great Armada was intended for the invasion of 
 England and nothing else. Then she called her 
 Little Pirate to her again and took counsel with 
 him, with the result that the next time he hoisted 
 his flag he did so on board the great Merchant 
 Royal at the head of twenty-three sail including 
 five battleships, two first-class cruisers, seven 
 second-class, and about a dozen gunboats. Nor 
 did he go this time as the Queen's licensed pirate 
 but as her Admiral of the Fleet, duly commissioned 
 in her name to burn, sink, and destroy, and to use
 
 THE QUEEN'S LITTLE PIRATE 61 
 
 all means whatever to prevent the various divisions 
 of the Armada coming together. 
 
 Even now, at the last minute of the eleventh 
 hour, treachery almost did its work, for there was 
 an Opposition and Peace-at-any-price Party in those 
 days, as there has been in later ones. Drake seems 
 to have known what was coming, for, when the 
 Queen's messenger dashed into Plymouth bearing 
 the fatal orders, he had gone. 
 
 Happily there was no telegraph in those days. If 
 there had been it would probably have proved the 
 ruin of England and the triumph of Spain. As it was 
 the next news that came was from Drake himself, 
 telling, laconically as usual, how he had " singed the 
 King of Spain's beard in Cadiz." When the facts 
 came out, the said singeing was seen to amount to 
 the destruction by burning and sinking of 12,000 
 tons of shipping, including some of the finest 
 ships of war that floated. The whole English 
 fleet had, as had now become the custom on such 
 occasions, been revictualled at Spanish expense, 
 and four large ships- full of provisions were cap- 
 tured intact. 
 
 From Cadiz the triumphant Admiral raged up 
 and down the terror-stricken coast, storming strong- 
 holds, and burning and scuttling the store-ships of 
 the Great Armada. He went to Lisbon, where 
 Santa Cruz, said to be the greatest sea-captain in 
 Europe, lay, and, after vainly challenging him to 
 come out and fight, politely offered to convoy him
 
 62 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 and his fleet to England "if by chance his course 
 should lie that way." The fact was that the Colossus 
 was paralysed. Drake had struck out straight at its 
 heart, and so doing had proved two principles of no 
 small moment to the making of the British Empire: 
 first, the true frontiers of a maritime nation are its 
 enemies' coasts ; second, the only effective method 
 of defence for such a nation is attack. 
 
 It was on his way home from this expedition, 
 storm-shattered and disgusted at missing the Plate- 
 Fleet, which had once more slipped through his 
 fingers, that Gloriana's Little Pirate took the richest 
 prize of his life. This was the San Felipe. She 
 was the King of Spain's own treasure-ship, and 
 she came, not from the West, but from the East. 
 Though he knew it not, Drake had that day done a 
 very great thing for England and the making of 
 her Empire, for not only did the San Felipe carry 
 treasure and rich stuffs to the value of something 
 like a million and a quarter of our money, but she 
 had on board dispatches, letters, and account-books 
 which let the English merchants into all the secrets 
 of Spain's East Indian trade, and led to the almost 
 instant formation of the Honourable East India 
 Company, itself an Empire- Maker of no small 
 account. 
 
 The epic of the Elizabethan era was now begin- 
 ning to hurry towards its climax. But Gloriana was 
 still surrounded by traitors, and even now tem- 
 porising was the order of the day. She was cast
 
 THE QUEEN'S LITTLE PIRATE 63 
 
 down by remorse for the execution of Mary Queen 
 of Scots, and she even reprimanded her Little 
 Pirate for doing her too good service, and told 
 Philip that he was in disgrace for exceeding in- 
 structions. 
 
 It was in vain that Drake and the other friends 
 of England prayed and entreated and stormed and 
 swore. In vain they pointed across the Narrow- 
 Seas to Parma in the Netherlands at the head of 
 30,000 of the finest troops in Europe, and to the 
 ports of Spain and Portugal, once more swarming 
 with shipping and echoing with the noise of warlike 
 preparations. For a time the liars and traitors had 
 things their own way again. Drake and Howard 
 implored her to let them get their ships fitted and 
 go and fight the Armada in its own ports. No, she 
 would do nothing. And she did nothing till at last 
 arrived that fatal evening on which 
 
 " There came a gallant merchant-ship full sail to Plymouth Bay." 
 
 Golden weeks and priceless opportunities had 
 been wasted by the fatal lethargy of the Court. 
 Drake and Howard, instead of falling, as they 
 longed to do, on the wind-bound Armada in Vigo 
 Bay, and doing with it as Drake had done at Cadiz, 
 were kept on the defensive, straining like blood- 
 hounds at the leash, knowing that every moment 
 that the good wind lasted was heavily fraught with 
 fate for England and perhaps the world. 
 
 At length the wind went round, and Drake, mar-
 
 64 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 veiling in angry wonder "how God could have s.ent 
 a south-west wind just then," found himself baffled 
 and beaten back, while Medina-Sidonia with his 
 released Armada sailed triumphantly for the 
 Channel. There was only one thing now to do 
 if England was to be saved. Valour and heroism, 
 self-devotion and skill, must repair the damage 
 that treason, lying, and weakness of head or heart 
 had done. By this time the Armada should have 
 been a crushed and tangled mass of burning wreck- 
 age, and so it would have been if Drake had had 
 his way, and now here it was stronger than ever, 
 its ships covering the hitherto Inviolate Sea ; and 
 there was Parma, with his transports still unde- 
 stroyed, only waiting to join hands with Sidonia to 
 once for all strangle the Heretic in their pitiless 
 
 In the mighty and memorable fight that followed, 
 our Little Pirate commanded on his own ship, the 
 immortal Revenge. With almost incredible labour 
 and skill the English fleet was somehow worked 
 and warped out to the westward until, when 
 that famous Sunday morning dawned, the sun 
 looked, as has been truly said, upon a sight 
 glorious for England. There was the great Ar- 
 mada, crescent-shaped, rolling up the Channel, 
 and there, right in the wind's eye and on its rear, 
 were two English squadrons, and a third was gal- 
 Jantly advancing out of Plymouth. 
 
 This one, with true Elizabethan insolence, steered
 
 THE QUEEN'S LITTLE PIRATE 65 
 
 right across the front of the huge fleet, firing into 
 such of the Dons as came within range. Then it 
 went about, and joined the other English ships to 
 windward. 
 
 Every one has read of the long, running, seven-day 
 fight that followed ; every one knows how the little, 
 light-heeled English ships ran in and out among 
 the great unwieldy galleons, tempting them out of 
 their formation, and, having isolated one, fell on her 
 like a pack of dogs on a wolf ; and how, in spite of 
 all that the English Admiral and his captains could 
 do, the ever-changing wind and the ever-succeeding 
 calms so helped the Spaniards, that in the end they 
 reached the Straits of Dover but little worse off than 
 they started. 
 
 If Drake could have had his way, these tactics 
 would have been pushed farther, and every mile of 
 the way would have been disputed ; but Lord 
 Howard, though a brave man, lacked the all- 
 daring assurance of the conqueror of Santo Dom- 
 ingo and Cartagena. He would not fight until he 
 had joined with Seymour and Wynter in the 
 Straits. So it came about that on the seventh 
 day that is to say, Saturday afternoon the Great 
 Armada, the poorer only by some dozen craft that 
 had been captured or battered into wreck and ruin, 
 was sailing gloriously past Calais with the French 
 and English land well in sight, and Dunkirk, the 
 try sting-place with Parma, only eighteen miles 
 away. 
 
 6
 
 66 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 England has never passed through such anxious 
 hours as she did that afternoon and night. It 
 seemed as though, after all, her new-found sea- 
 strength had failed her, and that, despite all the 
 brilliant exploits of Gloriana's Little Pirate in the 
 West, he was powerless to protect her nearer home. 
 What would have happened in the ordinary course 
 of events no one now knows, for the Spaniards, 
 stricken by some inexplicable madness, suddenly 
 altered the whole course of events by what can only 
 be called a freak of idiocy. 
 
 Medina-Sidonia, after having accomplished the 
 most brilliant feat of seamanship that his age had 
 seen, gave orders for the Armada to anchor ! A few 
 hours more and its work would have been done, 
 with what results to England one scarcely cares to 
 picture. So unexpected was this piece of priceless 
 good fortune by the English captains that they had 
 to drop their own anchors within range of the 
 Spanish guns to save entangling themselves with 
 the big Spanish ships. 
 
 All Sunday the two fleets lay within sight of each 
 other ; anxious councils of war were held on both 
 sides, and so night fell without a shot being fired 
 or anything done. By midnight the tide was 
 swirling strong and swift from the English to the 
 Spanish ships, and Drake was busy preparing his 
 crowning piece of devilry for the edification of the 
 Dons. 
 
 At about one o'clock on that calm, moonless
 
 THE QUEEN'S LITTLE PIRATE 67 
 
 morning, patches of flickering, leaping flame began 
 to show among the twinkling English lights, and 
 these grew swiftly higher and broader, and a few 
 minutes later the terrified Dons saw eight fire-ships 
 crowned mast-high with leaping flames, come reeling 
 and roaring into their midst. 
 
 Then there was cutting of cables and slipping of 
 moorings, and labouring with frantic haste to get the 
 ships under sail. Galleon crashed into galleasse, and 
 galleasse into cruiser in the wild haste and fatal con- 
 fusion. 
 
 Marvellous to say, not a single Spanish ship took 
 fire, but behind the fire-craft there was something 
 more terrible and deadly still El Draque and his 
 guns. At the supreme moment Lord Howard 
 weakly and foolishly turned aside to capture or 
 sink a disabled galleasse. If the rest of the fleet 
 had followed him there might have been no Battle 
 of Gravelines, and the Trafalgar of the Sixteenth 
 Century might never have been fought. But, as has 
 been well said, it was the hour for which Francis 
 Drake had been born. He set the Revenge on the 
 wind, and, followed by the rest of the squadron, bore 
 down in grim and ominous silence on the huddled, 
 entangled Dons. Within pistol range of the great 
 San Martin the Revenge burst into sudden thunder 
 and flame, and drove on enwreathed in smoke. In 
 her wake ship after ship came on in perfect order, 
 each raining her iron storm into the rent and 
 splintering sides of the Dons as they passed.
 
 68 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 Then from Dover way came the roar of guns 
 telling that Wynter and Seymour had got to work, 
 and so for three hours they went at it, the Little 
 Pirate ever first, and revelling in the work that he 
 loved to do for his dear England. He had for- 
 gotten all his mistress's slights and fickleness, all 
 the harm that Court traitors had done him, all his 
 suffering and privation on the windless seas and 
 burning lands of the West. It was the hour of 
 England's fate and his own, and there he was in 
 the thick of it, and he was happy. 
 
 After three hours Howard and his laggards came 
 up, and the fight roared on flank and front and rear. 
 Although the school-books say but little about it, 
 there had never been such a sea-fight in the world 
 before, nor one on whose end such great issues 
 hung. The Spaniards, caught between El Draque 
 and the sands of Dunkirk which to them was 
 something worse than being between the devil and 
 the deep sea fought with all their ancient valour, 
 but ship after ship, as the battle roared on through 
 the day, went down riddled with shot or took fire 
 and blew up, till at length out of the forty battle- 
 ships and cruisers which Sidonia had somehow got 
 together to protect his rear, only sixteen were left, 
 and they were little better than shot-shattered, fire- 
 blackened hulks. 
 
 The powder on both sides was nearly done, but 
 so too was the work of Drake and his ships. 
 Fathom by fathom the north-west wind was driving
 
 THE QUEEN'S LITTLE PIRATE 69 
 
 the Dons on to the mud-banks of the Netherland 
 shore, and the Little Pirate in his well-named 
 Revenge was hanging on their weather quarter 
 watching and I doubt not praying for the 
 moment of their final ruin. 
 
 And yet he was not to see it, for when there was 
 but five fathoms of water between the Spanish 
 keels and the Dutch mud the north-wester dropped 
 to a calm, a fresh south-wester sprang up in its 
 place, and for the fourth time in seven days the 
 Armada was saved from utter destruction by those 
 fickle winds to which a pious sentiment has ascribed 
 its ruin. 
 
 Down went the Spanish helms, and round came 
 the dripping, labouring, Spanish prows, and ere 
 long all that was left of King Philip's fleet was 
 staggering away to the northward to begin that 
 awful voyage round the north of Scotland and past 
 the wild Irish coast from which so few were to 
 return. Meanwhile the Little Pirate hung on to 
 the heels of the flying Armada for two days and 
 nights, until at length a tempest came rolling up 
 over the Dogger Bank, and he ran in for safety 
 under the Scottish shore, cheerfully leaving the 
 Dons to the winds of heaven, and the rocks that 
 were waiting to finish what his own guns had 
 begun. 
 
 With the victory of Gravelines, Drake's work as 
 an Empire-maker comes to an end. The expedi- 
 tion to Portugal, for all its booty, was a failure and
 
 70 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 did nothing to enhance his fame. If his advice had 
 been taken Spain might have been crushed and 
 humbled for ever, but such was the hopeless weak- 
 ness and vacillation at Court that, even after the 
 Armada had shown her the true designs of Philip, 
 Gloriana got into negotiations with him again. 
 Over and over again her Little Pirate besought her 
 to give him the means of striking the blow that 
 should crush Spain and make England undisputed 
 mistress of the seas, but it was not to be, and so at 
 length, sick and sore at heart, he sailed away again 
 to his beloved West, never to return. 
 
 There is nothing in this last expedition of his 
 that is noteworthy save its continued misfortunes. 
 It seemed as though when the little Revenge 
 went down, as she did in the midst of the fifty- 
 three Spanish ships which she had fought "for a 
 day and a night," she had taken her old com- 
 mander's good luck down with her. At last on 
 the deadly island of Escudo de Veragua the two 
 guardian demons of El Dorado, fever and dysentry, 
 struck him down with many another of his men. 
 He lived to get away, but not for long, and six 
 days afterwards, when his fleet came to anchor off 
 Puerto Bello, the heroic Little Pirate breathed his 
 last and his gallant soul went to its account, passing 
 away from earth on the very spot that had been the 
 scene of his first sea-fight and his first victory.
 
 IV 
 OLIVER CROMWELL 
 
 "HEALER AND SETTLER"
 
 IV 
 OLIVER CROMWELL 
 
 " T T E is perhaps the only example which history 
 JL A affords of one man having governed the 
 most opposite events and proved sufficient for the 
 most various destinies." 
 
 No man's character was ever so completely and 
 so tersely summed up as the great Oliver's is here 
 in these few words of a critic belonging to another 
 race and nation, and, as regards his varied destinies, 
 it may be added that no man ever was raised up 
 and set to work by the Controller of human destinies 
 as opportunely as he was. 
 
 History shows no parallel to it, not even in the 
 oft-quoted story of Cincinnatus, and certainly in all 
 the long array of our rulers there is none other 
 whose story is so crammed with wonders or who 
 crowded so many notable and pregnant acts into 
 the busy days of a few years as this gentleman- 
 farmer of Huntingdonshire, who at forty-three left 
 his farming and vestry-meetings and the like and 
 girded on his sword to go and fight the good fight 
 of freedom, and who at fifty-two laid it aside to 
 
 73
 
 74 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 prove himself as good a statesman and ruler as he 
 had been soldier and general. 
 
 His claim to a foremost place among the Makers 
 of Britain is a twofold one, for he was a restorer, 
 a reinvigorator, as it were, of this realm, as well as 
 a very considerable widener of it. When the futile 
 and inglorious reign of "the most learned fool in 
 Christendom " came to an end, all the brilliant 
 promise of the Elizabethan age had been wofully 
 obscured, and the glories of the great Queen and 
 her pirates looked like those of a summer sun 
 setting behind a bank of fog. 
 
 As Macaulay justly put the case : "On the day 
 of the accession of James I. England descended 
 from the rank which she had hitherto held and 
 began to be regarded as a Power hardly of the 
 second order ... He began his administration by 
 putting an end to the war which had raged many 
 years between England and Spain, and from that 
 time he shunned hostilities with a caution which 
 was proof against the insults of his neighbours and 
 the clamour of his subjects." 
 
 How different this from the gallant days of 
 Gloriana and her knights ! And yet this poor 
 crowned and sceptred ninny aspired to be a despot 
 even as his son after him did. It is true that these 
 realms were beginning to need a despot and that 
 badly, but not such a one as could ever have been 
 born of that hopeless House of Stuart. A despot 
 who is a strong man may be good or evil as he uses
 
 OLIVER CROMWELL 75 
 
 his opportunities and his powers, but the whole 
 stage of history has not yet held a despot who was 
 also a weak man who did not prove himself at once 
 a curse to his country and the world. 
 
 The story of the feeble violence and silly cunning 
 with which Charles the First sought to enforce that 
 ridiculous theory of his about the Divine Right of 
 Kings has been too often and too variously told for 
 us to need to trouble with it here. There is a 
 Divine Right of Kings, as the great Oliver was 
 very soon to show with most unmistakable and 
 most unanswerable logic, but the kind of king who 
 really has Divine rights does not usually have them 
 because he is the son of his father, and especially of 
 such a father as James the First of England and 
 Sixth of Scotland. 
 
 Our present concern is with the fact that this 
 Empire of ours, in a most critical state of its process 
 of making which came very near to one of un- 
 making, was saved and transformed from weakness 
 to strength by the substitution of the real despotism 
 of the Lord Protector from the sham or histrionic 
 despotism of Charles the First. 
 
 The fact was that the body-corporate of this 
 infant empire was assailed by the worst of all 
 national disorders, internal disintegration. England, 
 the very heart and centre of it, was about to be rent 
 in twain by the frenzied and pitiless talons of civil 
 war, and that is a war in which the right side 
 which, of course, is always the best side must
 
 76 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 not only win, but utterly crush and pulverise the 
 other unless wreck and chaos irretrievable are to 
 follow. 
 
 This was the central idea that the Great Oliver 
 grasped just as Edward of the Long Legs had 
 grasped his brilliantly premature idea of the United 
 Kingdom. He was the latest of that series of iron 
 handed men that had begun with William the 
 Norman. The watchword of his whole public life 
 was " healing and settling." The wounds of his 
 country had to be healed and its disorders settled 
 no matter by what means, so long as it was done, 
 and in this deep-rooted conviction we see at a 
 glance his kinship with the other Empire-makers 
 who had gone before him. 
 
 Of his early life there is little to be said, though 
 it is noteworthy that he was once fined 10 for 
 neglecting a summons to appear at the King's 
 coronation and receive the honour of knighthood. 
 He little thought then that he would one day find 
 it his duty to refuse the crown and sceptre of 
 England. 
 
 Every one who has read even the school-books 
 knows that when the war actually began all the 
 apparent advantages were on the side of the 
 Royalists. Though the first battles afforded the 
 extraordinary spectacle of mere conflicts of amateur 
 soldiers, few of whom had ever seen a real fight 
 before, the Cavaliers, trained to horsemanship and 
 the use of arms, and versed in all manly sports,
 
 OLIVER CROMWELL 77 
 
 made far finer fighting material than the raw levies 
 of the Parliament. Had this difference continued 
 victory must have remained, as it began, with the 
 Royalists, with results to the nation that could 
 hardly have failed to be of the very worst sort. 
 This is what Cromwell himself says on this all- 
 important subject : 
 
 " At my first going out into this engagement I 
 saw our men were beaten at every hand. Your 
 troops, said I, are most of them old, decayed ser- 
 ving-men, and tapsters and such kind of fellows, 
 and, said I, their troops are gentlemen's sons, 
 younger sons and persons of quality. Do you 
 think that the spirits of such base, mean fellows 
 will ever be able to encounter gentlemen that have 
 honour and courage and resolution in them ? You 
 must get men of spirit and, take it not ill what I 
 say I know you will not of a spirit that is likely 
 to go on as far as gentlemen will go, or else you will 
 be beaten still." 
 
 These wise words, which, by the way, were said 
 to no less a man than John Hampden himself, form 
 a key to all the battles of the Civil War. No sooner 
 did Oliver come on to the field as a plain captain of 
 yeomanry horse than his keen, if untaught, eye in- 
 stantly recognised the one great virtue and strength 
 of the Royalist party. They had an Idea, a devo- 
 tion, a principle for the sake of which men were 
 ready to sell their lands, melt their plate, beggar 
 their families, and lose their own lives, and men so
 
 78 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 equipped could only be successfully met and with- 
 stood by men who, as he himself put it in that 
 quaintly eloquent phraseology of his, "made some 
 conscience of what they did," and thereupon he set 
 himself to find such men and make soldiers of 
 them. 
 
 How well he succeeded the following extract 
 from a contemporary news-letter written some ten 
 months after the outbreak of war will sufficiently 
 tell: 
 
 " As for Colonel Cromwell " promotion, it will 
 be seen, was somewhat rapid in those stormy days 
 "he hath two thousand brave men, well disci- 
 plined. No man swears but he pays his twelve 
 pence. If he be drunk he is set in the stocks, or 
 worse. If one calls the other Roundhead he is 
 cashiered ; insomuch that the countries where they 
 come leap for joy of them and come in and join 
 with them. How happy it were if all the forces 
 were thus disciplined ! " 
 
 On the field of Marston Moor, Prince Rupert 
 nicknamed Cromwell "Old Ironsides," and from 
 that day to this the most invincible troops that ever 
 marched to battle have been named after him. 
 Years afterwards, when his work and theirs was 
 done, their leader was able to say of them : " From 
 that day forward they were never beaten and 
 wherever they were engaged against the enemy 
 they beat continually." 
 
 This is literally true. Whether in skirmish or
 
 OLIVER CROMWELL 79 
 
 battle, at home or abroad, whether pitted against 
 the disorderly chivalry of the Loyalists or the rigid 
 discipline of the finest Continental troops ; whether 
 storming a breach or bearing the brunt of a half- 
 lost battle, these psalm - singing, hard - hitting 
 Crusaders of the new Church Militant not only 7 
 were never beaten, but never once failed to hurl 
 the enemy back in confusion and disaster. 
 
 In them, in short, that stubborn English valour 
 which has since pushed its way all over the world 
 was first disciplined. They formed the first model 
 ever seen of an English regiment, a combination of 
 many units of strength and valour moving and 
 fighting as one, and the fact that " Old Ironsides" 
 was the first man thus to add discipline to valour is 
 in itself no small portion of his title to fame as an 
 Empire- Maker. 
 
 The first occasion on which these Ironsides made 
 their mark in battle is one of even greater import- 
 ance than the battle itself, for it marks the entrance 
 on to the stage of history of the first regularly dis- 
 ciplined English regiment, the parent of those who, 
 on a thousand fields since then, have proved them- 
 selves worthy of their grim but splendid ancestors. 
 It was the first time, too, that they had a chance 
 to try conclusions with Rupert and his Cavaliers, 
 hitherto unconquered and irresistible. 
 
 It was July 2, 1644, on a dull and storm- 
 threatening afternoon, that Cavalier and Round- 
 head first met in a really serious fashion. Com-
 
 8o MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 pared with what was now to be done Edgehill and 
 all that had come after it had been trifles, for so far 
 the conflicts had been those of amateurs at the art 
 of war, each engaged, as it were, in licking the 
 other into shape, and the conclusion that they now 
 had to try was which of them had got into the best 
 shape. There were about four-and-twenty thousand 
 each of them as they stood through the anxious 
 hours of that summer afternoon on either side of a 
 ditch running across Marston Moor, each watching 
 for a chance to attack, but feeling, no doubt, that 
 the doings of the next few hours would decide an 
 issue which needed a certain amount of thinking 
 over. 
 
 The two armies were drawn up upon what is 
 now the regulation pattern, right and left wings and 
 centre. Cromwell with his Ironsides on the left of 
 the Parliamentary army faced Rupert on the right 
 of the Royalists, and he was supported by the in- 
 fantry of what was then known as the Eastern 
 Association. The King's centre was held by New- 
 castle, and against it was the Parliamentary centre 
 reinforced by nine thousand Scots infantry. The 
 Royal left wing was composed of Goring's cavalry 
 regiments and was faced by the Parliamentary right 
 wing under the two Fairfaxes. 
 
 During the afternoon there was an exchange of 
 cannon shots which doesn't seem to have done 
 very much harm on either side. Prince Rupert, 
 with his usual impetuosity, had been for some hours
 
 OLIVER CROMWELL 81 
 
 wanting to get over the ditch and try conclusions 
 with the Ironsides, who were posted on a little 
 eminence amidst standing corn, and who had wiled 
 away the anxious hours of waiting with mutual ex- 
 hortations and psalm singing, not a little to the 
 amusement of Rupert and his gallant scapegraces, 
 who were yet to learn that these close-cropped, 
 grim-visaged Puritans could ride and fight a great 
 deal better than they could sing. 
 
 The King's older generals, no doubt contem- 
 plating Continental etiquette, had decided that it 
 was too late to fight that evening and had with- 
 drawn to their quarters. Cromwell, laughing at 
 etiquette as he did at everything else that was not 
 of practical utility, saw his chance, jumped the ditch, 
 and went hot-footed and hot-handed into Rupert's 
 ranks. A bullet scored his neck, and hearing some 
 one cry out that he was wounded he shouted : 
 " All's well. A miss is as good as a mile ! " and 
 charged on. Whether or not he was the first to 
 use this now favourite expression I am not able to 
 say, but at least it was characteristic. 
 
 The charge was met in a fashion worthy of 
 Rupert and the gallant gentlemen who followed him, 
 and we learn that after the first onset the Ironsides 
 reeled back, but it was only for a moment. Some 
 Scots cavalry came up behind them, they surged 
 forward again, discipline and valour did their work, 
 and a few minutes afterwards Prince Rupert and 
 his merry men had met more than their match, and, 
 
 7
 
 82 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 ere long, to use his own words, Colonel Cromwell 
 " had scattered them before him like a little dust." 
 The remnants of them were chased and cut down 
 with a ruthless severity which was then part of the 
 Puritan character, almost to the gates of York, 
 eight miles away. 
 
 But Cromwell, profiting by the mistakes which 
 Rupert himself had made in his headlong charges, 
 kept his men well in hand, and when once the 
 Royalist right wing was broken, led them round 
 to see how the battle had gone on the Parlia- 
 mentary right and centre.. 
 
 If he had not done so Marston Moor might have 
 replaced Charles Stuart on the throne of England. 
 Goring had broken up Fairfax's cavalry as com- 
 pletely as Oliver had broken up Rupert's. He had 
 flung them back upon their infantry supports, break- 
 ing these in turn, after which he flung himself with 
 the seemingly triumphant Royalists of the centre on 
 the Scots Infantry, taking them in flank and almost 
 routing them, too. Only three regiments of them 
 out of nine held their ground, the rest had broken 
 and fled, and the Earl of Leven, their leader, was 
 already making the best of his way towards Leeds. 
 
 The battle at this moment presented one of the 
 strangest spectacles in the history of warfare. On 
 the one side Prince Rupert with his broken brigades 
 was flying towards the North, on the other Leven 
 and Manchester and Fairfax, believing the day 
 hopelessly lost, were making equal haste towards
 
 HE SWOOPED WITH HIS CAVALRY ROUND THE REAR OF THE 
 
 KING'S ARMY. 
 
 (/aj<r 83.)
 
 OLIVER CROMWELL 83 
 
 the South. Such was the juncture at which the 
 Man of Destiny arrived. He was in command of 
 the only really disciplined force on the field. 
 
 Mr. Frederic Harrison, in his excellent mono- 
 graph on Cromwell, thus graphically describes what 
 happened : " In an hour the genius of Cromwell 
 had changed disaster into victory. Launching the 
 Scotch troopers of his own wing against New- 
 castle's Whitecoats, and the infantry of the Eastern 
 Association to succour the remnants of the Scots 
 in the centre, he swooped with the bulk of his own 
 cavalry round the rear of the King's army, and fell 
 upon Goring's victorious troopers on the opposite 
 side of the field. Taking them in the rear, all dis- 
 ordered as they were in the chase and the plunder, 
 he utterly crushed and dispersed them. Having 
 thus with his own squadron annihilated the cavalry 
 of the enemy's both wings, he closed round upon 
 the Royalist centre, and there the Whitecoats and 
 the remnants of the King's infantry were cut to 
 pieces almost to a man." 
 
 Such was Marston Moor, and how completely it 
 was the work of the one man of destiny may be 
 seen in the fact that, complete and crushing as the 
 victory was, its advantages were almost entirely 
 negatived by the incapacity and imbecility of the 
 Parliamentary leaders in the West and South. 
 Every one of any consequence wanted to be 
 supreme leader ; no one had either definite plans 
 or the capacity to carry them through ; and when
 
 84 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 at last there was a prospect of bringing matters to 
 an issue on the field of Newberry, the Royalist 
 forces, though half-beaten, were allowed to get 
 away with all their guns, stores, and ammunition 
 in spite of the fact that Manchester was in com- 
 mand of a very superior force. 
 
 This was as good as a defeat for the forces of 
 the Parliament, for it was the cause of dividing 
 their councils. Manchester and those who sided 
 with him had apparently begun to fear the terrible 
 earnestness of the Captain of the Ironsides, and 
 were for making peace with the King and patch- 
 ing matters up somehow. But Cromwell, with 
 deeper insight, saw that the quarrel had now gone 
 too far and that it could not stop till one side or the 
 other had had a thorough and decisive beating, and 
 that side he was fully determined should be the 
 King's. 
 
 The dispute ended in the fall of Manchester and 
 the triumph of Cromwell. Then came the re- 
 organisation of the Parliamentary forces under 
 what was at this time the New Model, and this 
 New Model, be it noted, was the first standing 
 army of professional soldiers that the United 
 Kingdom had ever seen. Its nominal Commander- 
 in-Chief was Sir Thomas Fairfax, but its master 
 spirit and guiding genius was Oliver Cromwell. 
 
 But meanwhile the tide of Royalism had been on 
 the rise again, sweeping up from the West and 
 South. The armies faced each other on the borders
 
 OLIVER CROMWELL $5 
 
 of Leicestershire, but Cromwell was not there. 
 Fairfax, no doubt knowing his own weakness, 
 entreated that he might come and command the 
 horse. He came, and then, as Clarendon patheti- 
 cally remarks, " the evil genius of the Kingdom in a 
 moment shifted the whole scene," and it is related 
 that when, after rumours had been for some days 
 flying through both armies as to his arrival, " Old 
 Ironsides " at last came upon the field of action, all 
 the cavalry of the Parliament raised a great shout 
 of joy. 
 
 The battle that he came to fight was Naseby, 
 and, saving for the superior discipline displayed on 
 both sides, almost exactly the same things happened 
 as at Marston Moor. Cromwell this time com- 
 manded on the right wing, but Rupert was placed 
 at the Royalist's right, and was therefore opposed, 
 not to Cromwell, but to Ireton, his son-in-law and 
 second self. Once more the left wing of the Parlia- 
 ment was broken and scattered by the furious charge 
 of the gallant Cavaliers, once more the centre under 
 Fairfax was " sore overpressed " and thrown into 
 confusion, and once more Cromwell and his Iron- 
 sides, having ridden down everything that opposed 
 them, swung round behind the rear of the victorious 
 Royalists, swooped in a hurricane of irresistible 
 valour and determination on their flanks and rear, 
 turned defeat into victory, and snatched triumph out 
 of disaster. 
 
 It is true that even then there seemed so great
 
 86 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 a chance of the Royalists retrieving the day that 
 Charles, who had put himself at the head of the 
 flower of his cavalry, had thought himself warranted 
 in crying : " One charge more, gentlemen, and the 
 days is ours ! " But while he was thinking about 
 this, Cromwell, Fairfax, and Ireton had, by the 
 exercise of almost superhuman energy, reformed 
 the whole of their army, horse, foot, and artillery, 
 into complete battle-array on a new front, and 
 against this the fiery valour of the Cavaliers 
 dashed itself in vain. 
 
 Once more valour with generalship had conquered 
 valour without it. The defeat was utter and crush- 
 ing. For fourteen long miles the pursuit went on 
 and only stayed when the walls of Leicester were 
 in sight. The King's army was utterly destroyed 
 and he himself never again appeared at the head of 
 a force in the field. 
 
 During the twelve months that followed we see 
 the erstwhile Farmer of Huntingdon in a new light 
 as the besieger and reducer of strong places. His 
 methods were logical, effective and, we may fairly 
 add, pitiless. Those days were not these any more 
 than William the Norman's or Edward Longlegs' 
 were Cromwell's, and moreover we must remember 
 that he had set himself with all the strength of his 
 mighty nature to stamping the plague of civil war 
 out of the Three Kingdoms with such dispatch 
 as was possible, and it had got to be done speedily, 
 for outside were the enemies of Britain waiting to
 
 OLIVER CROMWELL 87 
 
 take advantage of the weakness that this plague 
 might leave her with. 
 
 First he summons the stronghold to surrender, 
 threatening all with the sword. If this is refused 
 he selects his point of attack, batters away at it 
 till he makes a practicable breach, then he gives 
 another chance of surrender, this time with some- 
 what better terms, but this is the last grace. 
 Refusal now means wave after wave of his 
 irresistible iron and leather-clad soldiery pouring 
 into the breach, till at last all opposition is beaten 
 down and then massacre for which, it may be 
 added, he and those with him are never at a loss 
 to find a biblical precedent. 
 
 The victories that he won by this method were 
 simply amazing. In about sixteen months he was 
 engaged in some sixty battles and sieges, and took 
 fifty fortified towns and cities with over a thousand 
 pieces of artillery, forty thousand stand of arms, and 
 between two and three hundred colours. The end 
 of this wonderful campaign was the Storm of Bristol. 
 This' happened on the loth and nth of Sep- 
 tember, 1646. As a feat of warfare it is almost 
 incredible. The second city in the kingdom, de- 
 fended by properly constructed earthworks and 
 fortifications, and garrisoned by four thousand 
 troops with a hundred and fifty pieces of cannon, 
 was stormed and taken with a loss of under two 
 hundred men ! 
 
 It reads more like one of Drake's insolently
 
 88 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 valiant attacks upon a Spanish treasure -city than a 
 desperate conflict between Englishmen and English- 
 men. There can only be one explanation of it, and 
 that explanation is summed up in the two words : 
 Oliver Cromwell. We are bound to grant that the 
 valour was equal on both sides, but equally we are 
 forced to admit that all the genius and generalship 
 were on one. 
 
 Looked at from our point of view, there were 
 terrible blemishes on these triumphs. Every ad- 
 vantage was pursued with the unsparing ferocity 
 which was possible only to religious bigotry fired to 
 a white heat. It is only reasonable to suppose that 
 these Puritan champions of the new faith were fired 
 with just the same furious and pitiless zeal as that 
 which inspired the Israelites in their attack on 
 Canaan, or the first armies of Islam in their assaults 
 on the idolaters of the East. They slew and spared 
 not, they hewed their enemies in pieces as Samuel 
 hewed Agag " before the Lord," and they honestly 
 believed that the Lord looked down with approval 
 on them and their bloody work. 
 
 Priceless treasures of art were destroyed, not only 
 without remorse, but with grim exultation. To them 
 they were abominations of the heathen, just as the 
 Canaanite idols of silver and gold were to the 
 armies of Israel. But however ferociously it was 
 done, the work was done thoroughly, and by 
 August, 1646, the fall of Ragland Castle following 
 on the surrender of Oxford, brought down the
 
 OLIVER CROMWELL 89 
 
 curtain on the first act of the Civil War. Charles 
 gave himself up to the Scots at Newark, and 
 Oliver turned to fight the enemies of his own house- 
 hold. 
 
 The chief of these enemies, curiously enough, 
 was that same Parliament in whose name he had 
 won all his brilliant triumphs, and a conflict, very 
 interesting to the student of humanity, now began 
 between the Man of Action and one of those Talk- 
 ing Machines which the good Earl Simon some 
 four centuries before had found so singularly 
 ineffective. 
 
 There is no need to tell in detail how the struggle 
 went. Every one knows how Cromwell preached 
 and prayed and stormed at the self-sufficient busy- 
 bodies who thought themselves a power in the land 
 because they called themselves a parliament. Then, 
 seeing that no other method would stop their 
 gabble, he brought in his soldiers and turned them 
 out to talk in the streets or wherever else they 
 could get any one to listen to them, while he went 
 on with his work. 
 
 It is not very many years since Thomas Carlyle, 
 who perhaps understood Cromwell better than any 
 other man not living in his own age, was walking 
 over Westminster Bridge with a very distinguished 
 British officer one night when the Mother of 
 Parliaments was busy tearing her hair and rending 
 her garments over some wordy futility or other, 
 and, jerking his thumb towards the lighted windows,
 
 90 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 he said : " Ah, my lord, I should like to see the 
 good day when you would go in there with a file of 
 Grenadiers as old Noll did with his dragoons and 
 clear that nest of cacklers out. Maybe the nation 
 would get some of its business done then instead of 
 only getting it talked about." 
 
 From this there is a certain moral to be drawn by 
 the wise. For my own part I should dearly love to 
 know with what words old Noll himself would 
 have answered the Sage of Chelsea. 
 
 The payment of the Scots' arrears by the Parlia- 
 ment, their surrender of the king who, by the way, 
 was a great deal stronger in helpless captivity than 
 he had ever been at the head of an army and his 
 seizure by Cromwell through the instrumentality of 
 Cornet Joyce and his troop of horse, now led up 
 to a very singular situation. Cromwell, the con- 
 queror, went over to the side of Charles Stuart the 
 captive, and if it had not been for that fatal twist in 
 the king's moral nature, there is no telling but that he 
 might have been re-seated on a throne supported and 
 surrounded by the pikes and sabres of the Ironsides. 
 
 But unhappily for him, it was not in Charles 
 Stuart's nature to "go straight," and, in the end, 
 after Cromwell had faced and quelled a mutiny 
 among his own men on his account, he discovered 
 that the king was playing him false, that he did not 
 honestly wish to follow his policy of " healing and 
 settling," but only to regain his freedom and try 
 the hazard of battle again.
 
 OLIVER CROMWELL 91 
 
 From that moment Cromwell was his unsparing 
 enemy. Now he saw in Charles " The Man of 
 Blood " who, for the sake of a personal aspiration 
 and for personal profit, was eager to once more set 
 his subjects by the ears and light the flame of war 
 from end to end of the country. 
 
 West and South and North the Loyalists were 
 arming and rising again and the Scots were march- 
 ing across the Border, so the Man of Destiny 
 stopped talking and preaching, buckled on his 
 sword and strode out to battle once more. 
 
 The first rising was in Wales, and that he crushed 
 as promptly as he did pitilessly. Then he turned 
 with a weary and war-worn army of some seven 
 thousand men, so wasted with marching and priva- 
 tion and sickness that, as a record of the time tells 
 us, " they seemed rather fit for a hospital than a 
 battle," to face the invading Scots in the North. 
 
 He met them at Preston. They were three to 
 one or rather, to be more exact, twenty-four thou- 
 sand to seven thousand well armed and found and 
 confident of victory. Yet never did the military 
 genius of the great Oliver shine out more brilliantly 
 than now. What followed was not a battle ; it was 
 an onset, a chase, and a massacre which lasted 
 three days and extended over some thirty miles of 
 country. When it was over Cromwell wrote in one 
 of those marvellous dispatches of his : " We have 
 quite tired our horses in pursuit of the enemy. We 
 have killed and disabled all their foot and left them
 
 92 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 only some horse. If my horse could but trot after 
 them I would take them all." 
 
 The next act in the swiftly-moving drama was 
 the trial and execution of him who to this day is 
 considered by some to have been a royal martyr, 
 who only exchanged an earthly for a heavenly 
 crown, and by others is looked upon as the man 
 who deliberately made himself guilty of the worst 
 of all blood-guiltiness, the guilt of civil war. That 
 is a matter for each one to decide according to his 
 own convictions, which, be it noted, some two and 
 a half centuries of argument have not yet altered. 
 Here we are only concerned with Cromwell's share 
 in it. 
 
 There can be no doubt to an unbiassed mind 
 that at one period he honestly tried for a monarchical 
 settlement of the difficulty. It is equally undeniable 
 that he considered Charles's double-dealing respon- 
 sible for what he held to be the unpardonable crime 
 of the Second Civil War and therefore as having 
 incurred for a second time the guilt of blood. 
 That the execution, or murder, of the king met 
 with his entire approval cannot be doubted, since 
 before it happened he said to Algernon Sidney : 
 " I tell you we will cut off his head with the crown 
 upon it." 
 
 So, whether crime or act of justice, it was done, 
 and Cromwell, perhaps more than any one else, was 
 responsible for it. 
 
 The next act is the Dictatorship, and the first
 
 OLIVER CROMWELL 93 
 
 scene in it the re-conquest of Ireland, with its 
 massacres and bitter, pitiless persecutions in 
 revenge or punishment, as you will, for other 
 massacres which had gone before. It is a piteous 
 story, and one of no great credit to any one, but, 
 to borrow the maxim of Strafford, the former 
 tyrant of Ireland, it was " thorough." In nine 
 months, with about fifteen thousand men, the 
 Dictator had stamped .the Irish rebellion out and 
 made "the curse of Cromwell " a phrase that will 
 dwell on Hibernian lips for many a generation. 
 
 But no sooner was the Irish revolt drowned in 
 blood and flame than Prince Charles, afterwards 
 Charles II. of infamous memory, took the Oath 
 to the Covenant, and the Scots rose to support 
 him. Cromwell crossed the Border on July 22, 
 1650. 
 
 As it happened, the Scottish general was Leslie, 
 the old comrade who had fought at his side at 
 Marston Moor. For some weeks the Scots played 
 a waiting game, and Cromwell, with his men wearied 
 and falling sick, and with no other base than his 
 ships on the coast, hurled texts and biblical harangues 
 at the enemy. In fact, as Mr. Harrison cleverly 
 puts it, " it was not so much a battle between two 
 armies as between two rival congregations in arms." 
 
 Leslie and his preachers fired other texts back at 
 him and kept out of his way until the fatal 3rd ot 
 September came. By this time Cromwell had only 
 eleven thousand men capable of bearing arms, a.nd
 
 94 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 they were in no great state for fighting. Leslie 
 had twenty-two or three thousand Scots and all the 
 advantage of the position, but the Fates had already 
 taken the matter into their own hands. On the 
 afternoon of the 2nd, Cromwell saw that the wary 
 Scot, as some say, driven by the frantic exhortation 
 of the preachers, had forsaken his post of vantage. 
 " The Lord hath delivered them into our hands ! " he 
 cried, and straightway began to set his battle in order. 
 
 The next morning, while it was yet moonlight, 
 they came to blows. In an hour or so it was all 
 over. The Scots fled in utter panic and confusion, 
 "being made by the Lord of Hosts as stubble to 
 our swords," to use Oliver's own words. When the 
 rout was at its height the sun rose, scattering the 
 morning mists. " Let God arise and His enemies 
 be scattered ! " he shouted exultantly through the 
 roar of the battle, and then how characteristic it 
 was of the man ! he halted his army in the very 
 moment of triumph and sang the one hundred and 
 seventeenth psalm, beginning : " O praise the Lord 
 all ye people, for His merciful kindness is great 
 towards us ! " Then he unleashed his bloodhounds 
 again, and the rest was massacre. 
 
 Another year passed in miscellaneous fighting 
 and arguing, slaughter and psalm-singing, and 
 once more the sun of the 3rd of September, 
 Cromwell's Day of Fate, or, as Byron puts it : 
 
 "His day of double victory and death,"
 
 HE HALTED HIS ARMY . . . AND SANG THE HUNDRfc-D AND 
 SEVENTEENTH PSALM. 
 
 (Page 94-)
 
 OLIVER CROMWELL 95 
 
 dawned, this time over Worcester, the scene of 
 " the Crowning Mercy." The same miracles of 
 generalship were accomplished, the same tremen- 
 dous victory was won at a ridiculously small 
 expense under two hundred men to conquer an 
 entrenched army of fifteen thousand and this 
 was the end of the fighting at home. 
 
 But meanwhile there was fighting abroad, and, 
 more than that, the fame of the great Oliver and 
 his marvellous doings had been ringing from end 
 to end of Europe. As Clarendon, the historian 
 of the Royalists, candidly admits : "His greatness 
 at home was but a shadow of the glory he had 
 abroad." The mastery of the seas was wrenched 
 out of the hands of the Dutch by Blake, the sea- 
 power of England was organised as its land-power 
 was, and Britain rose at a bound from the degrada- 
 tion to which she had sunk under the first Stuart to 
 the proud position of the first naval and military 
 Power of the world, and the greatest ministers and 
 monarchs in Europe, even the Pope himself, were 
 forced to respect the prowess and cringe for the 
 friendship of the Farmer of Huntingdon. 
 
 If, as has been aptly suggested, the great Oliver 
 could have lived to an age which is now a normal 
 one for statesmen, the disgraceful and ruinous in- 
 terval occupied by the reigns of the second Charles 
 and the second James might have been spared with 
 all their infamy and national loss, and William of 
 Orange might worthily have continued the work
 
 96 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 which Cromwell so well began. But the time was 
 not yet, and so it was not to be. The great ideal 
 of his life, a Protestant Alliance, was never realised. 
 His last days were days of darkness and suffering, 
 social, mental, and physical. 
 
 Once more the Day of Fate came round, and 
 between three and four in the afternoon the 
 watchers by his bedside heard him sigh deeply 
 and heavily. Some say that he whispered : " My 
 work is done ! " and then he died. This may be 
 fact or fancy, but, be that as it may, no man had 
 a better right to pass out of the mystery of the 
 things that are into the mystery of the things that 
 are to be with such words on his lips than Oliver 
 Cromwell, General, Statesman, and King in every- 
 thing but the empty name.
 
 V 
 
 WILLIAM OF ORANGE, 
 
 OVERCOMER OF DIFFICULTIES
 
 V 
 WILLIAM OF ORANGE 
 
 T is perhaps one of the most curious facts of our 
 history that the Empire-Maker who, as it were, 
 finally completed the work begun by his namesake 
 William the Norman, should, like him, have been a 
 foreigner, should have sprung from similar ancestry, 
 and should have been his exact reverse in every 
 mental and physical quality save one an inflexible 
 determination to do the work which he was ap- 
 pointed to do in spite of every conceivable kind of 
 obstacle. 
 
 It is noteworthy also that this man should have 
 come from those same Low Countries from whose 
 shores our Saxon ancestors had first come on their 
 plundering forays to do their share of the work of 
 making the English people. The ancestry of the 
 great-grandson of William the Silent stretched far 
 back, probably even into those remote and turbulent 
 times, and it is within the limits of possibility that 
 some stalwart ancestor of the ancient House of 
 Nassau may himself have had something to do in 
 
 99
 
 ioo MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 the early making of that Realm, over which, a 
 thousand years later, his descendant was to rule 
 during one of the most critical and perilous periods 
 of its existence. 
 
 Be that, however, as it may, the central fact which 
 stands out in the story of William III. is this: 
 Whatever his country or ancestry, he was, so far as 
 we have any means of judging, the one man in 
 the world just then who could have accomplished 
 the difficult and, as it must often have seemed even 
 to him, almost impossible task which had to be 
 performed if the work of the other Empire- Makers 
 who had gone before him was not to be sadly 
 marred, if not altogether undone. 
 
 William of Orange may perhaps be most truth- 
 fully described as an overcomer of difficulties. Pro- 
 bably no other man ever had so many difficulties to 
 conquer as he had, and his triumph over them is 
 one of the finest examples of irresistible will-power 
 and purely intellectual force that all history has to 
 show. Mentally he was a giant, and as such he 
 acquitted himself in what was undoubtedly a battle 
 of giants fighting for the spoils of Europe. Physi- 
 cally he was a miserable weakling, shattered by 
 disease, seldom free from bodily pain, and fore- 
 doomed from his youth by an exhausting and 
 incurable malady. 
 
 Yet even his sports and pastimes were those, not 
 only of a healthy, but even of a robust constitution. 
 His pale, sickly, small-pox-pitted face never flushed
 
 WILLIAM OF ORANGE 101 
 
 save under the stimulus of battle or the chase. He 
 fought his fight with Fate and won it by sheer 
 intellectual strength, yet none of the pleasures of 
 intellect were his. He knew nothing of science, 
 little of literature, and less of art. 
 
 Apparently fitted by Nature only for the pursuits 
 of the study, he found his rare moments of real 
 happiness when riding down a stag or a boar in the 
 forests of Windsor or the woods of Flanders, or, 
 sword in hand, leading his men wherever the battle 
 was hottest or the danger the greatest. A creature 
 of contradictions, in short, determined to make him- 
 self that which Nature had seemingly not made him, 
 and to do that which he appeared least fitted to 
 do. 
 
 No one possessing an intelligent grasp of the 
 deplorable state of affairs which obtained in Eng- 
 land, and the threatening aspect of matters on the 
 Continent during the last decade but one of the 
 seventeenth century, would have guessed for a 
 moment that this "asthmatic skeleton," as Macau- 
 lay somewhat roughly describes his hero, was the 
 man to turn England's weakness into strength, 
 and even in defeat to grapple successfully with 
 the colossal Power which was threatening the 
 liberties of Europe. 
 
 In England the weakness and baseness of the 
 two last Stuart kings had more than undone the 
 work of the great Oliver. He had, as has been 
 shown, made England one of the first Powers in the
 
 102 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 world, strong at home and respected and even 
 courted abroad. Charles II. had sold his country, or 
 at any rate his own independence and what should 
 have been his royal honour, to France. He had, in 
 fact, exhibited to the world the disgraceful spectacle 
 of an English king who was the pensioner of a 
 foreign monarch. 
 
 The for-ever infamous Treaty of Dover had 
 brought the prestige of England to its lowest ebb. 
 For the first time in nearly seven hundred years 
 the Isle Inviolate had been seriously threatened 
 with invasion, and London, for the first time 
 since it had been a city, had heard the sound of 
 hostile guns. Now this of itself, taking the whole 
 history of these islands into consideration, is a fact 
 of absolutely unparalleled infamy, and yet if such 
 infamy could have been equalled, the brother and 
 successor of Charles II. would have done so. In- 
 deed, from one point of view it may be said that he 
 excelled it. 
 
 The guns of William's countrymen were heard in 
 the Thames because Charles II., having his brother 
 James for Lord High Admiral, had so scandalously 
 wasted the funds which should have been devoted 
 to the maintenance of the Navy that no adequate 
 defence was really possible ; but it was left for 
 James II., the last and most contemptible, if not in 
 all respects the worst king of the royal and miser- 
 able House of Stuart, to be the only British 
 monarch who ever brought a foreign army on to
 
 WILLIAM OF ORANGE 103 
 
 British soil for the purpose of coercing by force the 
 will of the British people. More than this, too, it 
 must be remembered that these foreign troops were 
 Frenchmen supported by renegade English, Irish, 
 or Scotsmen who had deliberately deserted their 
 own country to serve under the standard of a man 
 who was to the seventeenth century what Phillip 
 II. of Spain had been to the sixteenth. 
 
 So low, then, had Britain sunk in the scale of 
 nations when William of Orange made his entry 
 upon the stage of British history. The fact which 
 made his entry possible is hardly of the sort that 
 would commend itself to people of a romantic turn 
 of mind, although few romances have been really 
 more romantic than his own life-story. 
 
 He could never have become King of England, 
 nor is it likely that he could even have been asked 
 to constitute himself the protector of English liber- 
 ties, had it not been for the fact that he was married 
 to the daughter of James II., and of this marriage 
 Lord Macaulay truly says : "His choice had been 
 determined chiefly by political considerations, nor 
 did it seem likely that any strong affection would 
 grow up between a handsome girl of sixteen, well- 
 disposed, indeed, and naturally intelligent, but 
 ignorant and simple, and a bridegroom who, though 
 he had not completed his twenty-eighth year, was in 
 constitution older than her father ; whose manner 
 was chilling, and whose head was constantly 
 occupied by public business or by field sports."
 
 104 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 His marriage was, in short, "a marriage of con- 
 venience," and yet, in defiance of all the rules that 
 are supposed to govern the most intimate of all 
 human relationships, it was one of the best and, in 
 the end, most devoted unions that history has to 
 record. It is hardly possible to doubt that William 
 of Orange married Mary Stuart because he saw 
 with that keenly penetrating foresight of his that 
 such a union would strengthen him in his life-long 
 combat with the arch-enemy of his faith, his family, 
 and his nation ; and this enemy was that same 
 Louis of France who had made Charles II. his 
 pensioner, and was soon to make James II. his 
 dependent. 
 
 To quote Lord Macaulay again : "He saved 
 England, it is true, but he never loved her, and he 
 never obtained her love. . . . Whatever patriotic 
 feeling he had was for Holland . . . yet even his 
 affection for the land of his birth was subordinate to 
 another feeling which early became supreme in his 
 soul, which mixed itself with all his passions and 
 compelled him to marvellous enterprises, which 
 supported him when sinking under mortification, 
 pain, sickness, and sorrow . . . and continued to 
 animate him even while the prayer for the departing 
 was read at his bedside." 
 
 It was this hatred of France and her king which 
 nerved him to do for the liberties of Europe and 
 Great Britain what Francis Drake had done for 
 England against Philip of Spain, and in the doing
 
 WILLIAM OF ORANGE 105 
 
 of this he won the conspicuous glory of forcing the 
 paymaster of the two English sovereigns whom he 
 succeeded, to make peace with him on equal terms ; 
 and this, too, although he lost more battles than he 
 won, and had to surrender more strong cities than 
 he took. 
 
 It is comparatively easy for a conqueror to 
 take triumph out of victory, but it is a higher 
 quality which patiently endures defeat and confronts 
 disaster, and by sheer genius wins triumph in the 
 end. This is what William of Orange did, and it 
 is from this fact that he derives his title to be 
 ranked among the Makers of that Empire to whose 
 throne he came as an alien, and whose honour he 
 restored and upheld, as one might say, in spite of 
 herself. 
 
 So far as England is concerned, the male line of 
 Stuart came in with a fool and went out with a 
 coward. One does not even care to imagine what 
 would have happened if James II. had remained on 
 the throne ; or if William of Orange, with his here- 
 ditary and deep-rooted hatred of Louis XIV. and 
 his policy, had not come to take his most miserably- 
 vacated place in the nick of time. 
 
 The sentimentality which makes such a fuss about 
 loyalty to persons as distinguished from loyalty to 
 country, and the lawyer-quibbles which occupied 
 men's minds in the dispute as to whether James II. 
 was King de facto or de jure, or both, of the country 
 from which he had run away like an absconding
 
 106 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 debtor, may be dismissed, just as Harold the 
 Saxon's claims had been some six hundred years 
 before. It is merely a question of the Fit and the 
 Unfit, and James was Unfit. 
 
 James Stuart deserted his post as ruler of these 
 realms because he found himself assailed by difficul- 
 ties which the most ordinary ability ought to have 
 overcome. William assumed the same position in 
 the face of difficulties which only the highest quali- 
 ties of kingcraft and statesmanship could have 
 enabled him to successfully grapple with. In a 
 word, James possessed no ideal that qualified him 
 to be a king, much less an Empire- Maker. William 
 did possess such an ideal, and that is the only reason 
 why he became King of England, vice James Stuart, 
 absconded. 
 
 Next, perhaps, to Henry VII., William was the 
 most business-like sovereign who has occupied the 
 British throne. With him all men and things, all 
 beliefs and sentiments, were subordinated to the 
 achievement of the one great end the curbing of 
 the power of France, and consequently the further- 
 ance of political and theological liberty in Europe. 
 He was, in fact, only incidentally an Empire-Maker, 
 although without him and without the broad and 
 firm basis of popular liberty and national strength 
 which he laid down, as it were, in the doing of his 
 greater work, the building up of the Imperial fabric 
 would undoubtedly have been long delayed and 
 seriously impeded.
 
 WILLIAM OF ORANGE 107 
 
 He got himself made King of Great Britain 
 and Ireland, not because he wanted to occupy the 
 throne, but because from that eminence he would be 
 able to look the Grand Monarch more equally in the 
 face. 
 
 We get a luminous insight into the character of 
 the man in his reply to the Convention or conference 
 of the two Houses of Parliament which had pro- 
 posed that his wife as actual and lawful heir to 
 the throne which her father had forsaken, should 
 occupy it as queen, and that he should reign by 
 her authority as a sort of Royal Executive. 
 
 " My lords and gentlemen," he said, " no man 
 can esteem a woman more than I do the Princess, 
 but I am so made that I cannot think of holding 
 anything by apron-strings, nor can I think it reason- 
 able to have any share in the government unless it 
 be put in my own person, and that for the term of 
 my life. If you think fit to settle it otherwise I 
 will not oppose you, but will go back to Holland 
 and meddle no more in your affairs." 
 
 That was the kind of man William of Orange 
 was. He had come to be a king, and a king he 
 would be or nothing. And so king he was, and it 
 was not very long before he was to show how well 
 his self-confidence was justified. He had scarcely 
 seated himself on the throne before the Parliament, 
 recognising the fact that his work was something 
 other than merely filling James's place, deliberately 
 suggested that he should resume as King of Eng-
 
 io8 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 land the hostilities which he had begun against 
 Louis as Stadtholder of the Netherlands, and he 
 on his part showed how ready he was to take up 
 the task by exclaiming, in one of his rare bursts of 
 exultation, after reading the address : 
 
 " This is the first day of my reign ! " 
 
 This address, however, welcome as it was, was 
 somewhat belated. For more than a month before 
 it was presented, Louis, under the pretence of help- 
 ing the runaway, whom for his own purposes he 
 affected to believe still lawful King of England, 
 had committed the gravest of all acts of war, and 
 James had crowned the disgrace of his flight by the 
 infamy of heading an invasion of British territory 
 by foreign mercenaries. On the i2th of March, 
 1689, he landed at Kinsale as enemy and invader 
 of his own country, convoyed by fifteen French 
 men-of-war, and supported by 2,500 French 
 troops. 
 
 The story of this Irish war needs no re-telling 
 here, save in so far as it brings out the contrast 
 between William and James as the Fit and the 
 Unfit for the doing of that work which had just 
 then got to be done if England was not to sink 
 back to the degrading position of a French depen- 
 dency, and if the way of future progress and Im- 
 perial expansion was to be left open. William no 
 sooner saw that the scene of the fight for constitu- 
 tional liberty and religious freedom had shifted for 
 the time being from the Low Countries to Ireland
 
 WILLIAM OF ORANGE 109 
 
 than he sent Marshal Schomberg, who was then 
 one of the most skilful soldiers in Europe, with 
 an army of sixteen thousand men to the scene of 
 action. 
 
 Meanwhile the heroically stubborn resistance 
 which has won immortal fame for the men of 
 Londonderry had proved, not only to James and 
 his foreign mercenaries, but to Louis himself and all 
 Europe, that the struggle which was just then 
 renewed was no mere war of dynasties, and that 
 something very much greater than the mere ques- 
 tion as to who should be king of England had 
 got to be decided before the trouble was over. 
 
 James in Ireland and Louis in France stood for 
 the already discredited and exploded doctrine of the 
 divine right of kings to rule as they pleased because 
 they were the sons of their fathers ; for the dark 
 tyranny of Rome, now almost equally discredited ; 
 and for the domination of Europe by the French 
 autocracy. In Holland and England and Germany 
 William and his allies stood for the very reverse of 
 all this, so that it was not only the destinies of the 
 United Kingdom, but those of the greater part of 
 the civilised world that had to be decided, and it was 
 by procuring through mingled victory and defeat, 
 confronted by powerful enemies abroad and by 
 conspiracy and threatened assassination at home, 
 that the worthy descendant of William the Silent 
 proved his real right divine as king of these realms 
 and champion of those principles of which the
 
 i io MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 British Empire of to-day is the concrete expres- 
 sion. 
 
 It was really on the shores of an insignificant 
 Irish stream that William fought and won the 
 battle of European liberty. But before he did this 
 he had another battle to fight, as it were, in front of 
 his* newly-given throne. 
 
 His reign, unhappily, saw the commencement of 
 that system of government which an intelligent 
 Chinese Minister to the Court of St. James' once 
 described as " the election of one party to do the 
 business of the nation, and of another to stop them 
 doing it." In other words, it was William's fate, 
 among all his other difficulties, to have to contend 
 with the bitter and usually dishonest strife of 
 Parliamentary parties, and so keen did this strife 
 become after the foreign enemy had actually landed 
 on British soil, that he was even then on the point 
 of throwing up the whole business in disgust, and 
 going back to Holland to fight his battles out 
 there. 
 
 What would have happened if he had done so is 
 anything but a pleasant subject for speculation. 
 Happily, at the eleventh hour he refused to 
 acknowledge himself beaten. Sick of the strife 
 of words and longing for the reality of deeds, he 
 announced his intention to place himself at the head 
 of the English forces in Ireland, " and with the 
 blessing of God Almighty endeavour to reduce that 
 kingdom that it may no longer be a charge to this."
 
 WILLIAM OF ORANGE in 
 
 In this we may see more than the expression of 
 a pious hope. As statesman and soldier William 
 had seen that Ireland was the back-door of 
 Great Britain, and that so long as it remained 
 open so long would the whole kingdom be 
 vulnerable to foreign invasion, and so he went 
 to close it. 
 
 It was a strange position for any man to be 
 placed in. He was going to fight for everything 
 that he held dear. He knew that if he lost in 
 Ireland he must lose also in England and the 
 Netherlands, but he was also going to fight against 
 the father of the woman whom he had now come 
 to love so dearly that her death, when it happened, 
 came nearer to wrecking his imperial intellect than 
 all the other trials and troubles of his laborious and 
 almost joyless life. He had no feeling of personal 
 enmity against James as he had against Louis, and 
 it was duty, and duty alone, which took him to the 
 Irish war. Almost the last words that he said to 
 his wife concerning the enemy whom he was about 
 to meet on the battlefield were : 
 
 " God send that no harm may come to him ! " 
 
 Mr. Traill has thus tersely summed up the con- 
 dition of affairs at this moment : " Ireland in the 
 hands of a hostile army, the shores of England 
 threatened by a hostile fleet, a dangerous conspiracy 
 only detected on the eve of success, a formidable 
 insurrection imminent in the country he was leaving 
 behind him . .
 
 ii2 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 And yet, gloomy as the outlook seemed, his spirits 
 rose as they ever did when he saw the moment for 
 doing instead of talking draw near, and Bishop 
 Burnett tells us that he said to him on the eve of 
 his departure : " As for me, but for one thing I 
 should enjoy the prospect of being on horseback 
 and under canvas again, for I am sure that I am 
 fitter to direct a campaign than to manage your 
 Houses of Lords and Commons." 
 
 These words were well worthy of the man who, 
 not many days later, quietly sat down to breakfast 
 in the open air beside Boyne Water, within full 
 sight of the enemy and within easy range of their 
 guns. Breakfast over, he mounted his horse and 
 was promptly fired at. The first shot from two 
 field-pieces which had been trained on him and his 
 staff killed a man and two horses. The second 
 grazed his shoulder and made him reel in his 
 saddle. 
 
 " There was no need for any bullet to come nearer 
 than that ! " was his remark on the occurrence. 
 Certainly not many bullets have ever come nearer 
 to changing the history of Britain, and therefore 
 of the British Empire, than that one. 
 
 After the wound had been dressed, instead of 
 taking the rest which a good many strong men 
 would have taken, this consumptive and asthmatic 
 invalid re-mounted his horse and remained until 
 nightfall in the saddle, making his dispositions for 
 the battle of the morrow, and attending to every
 
 MADE HIM REEL IN HIS SADDLE. 
 (Page 1:2.)
 
 "MEN OF ENNISKILLEN, WHAT WILL YOU DO FOR ME?" HE CRIED. 
 
 (Page 113.)
 
 WILLIAM OF ORANGE 113 
 
 detail himself. His prudent uncle and father-in-law, 
 apparently bent on fulfilling William's pious wish, 
 was meanwhile taking very good care to keep 
 himself out of harm's way. 
 
 The battle itself, which, as every one knows, was 
 fought on the ist of July, brought out with startling 
 clearness the contrast between the man who was 
 king in his own right and the man who called 
 himself .king because his name was James 
 Stuart. 
 
 " Men of Enniskillen, what will you do for me?" 
 he cried at the critical moment of the fight, when 
 Caillemot and Schomberg, his two best captains, 
 had been killed, and he, drawing his sword and 
 swinging it aloft with his wounded arm, led his 
 trusty Dutch guards and Ulstermen against the 
 Irish centre. James, meanwhile, having watched 
 the first part of the fight on which all his fortunes 
 depended from the safe eminence of the Hill of 
 Donore, had already given up for lost the day 
 which he had done nothing to win, and was making 
 the best of his way to Dublin, whence, in due course, 
 leaving the beaten and demoralised rabble that had 
 once been his army to its fate, he fled to the con- 
 genial ignominy of his safe retreat at St. Ger- 
 main, and the fostering care of his country's 
 worst enemy. 
 
 The Battle of the Boyne not only settled the fate 
 of the Stuart dynasty for good ; it decided the 
 question whether this country was to be ruled by 
 
 9
 
 ii4 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 a feeble despotism under the patronage of France, 
 or by that constitutional monarchy under which 
 Great Britain has so worthily proved her title to be 
 called the Mother of Free Nations, and in winning 
 this battle and deciding this all-important question, 
 William of Orange won the right to be counted 
 among the wisest and strongest of our Empire- 
 Makers. The disgusted Irishmen, too, had some 
 reason on their side when they said to the victors 
 after the battle: "Change leaders, and we'll fight 
 you again ! " 
 
 The story of his wars in those countries which 
 have been aptly termed the cockpit of Europe is 
 the story of the continuation of that work which he 
 came to England to do ; not, as has already been 
 pointed out, for England as a country, but for the 
 establishment of those principles for which the 
 British Constitution, of which he was one of the 
 makers, stands. Ignorant or prejudiced critics 
 have accused him of sacrificing English blood and 
 treasure to the furtherance of his own ambition. 
 The fact is that he employed them upon the best 
 and most necessary work that there was for them 
 to do just then. 
 
 " Look at my brave English ! " he said to the 
 Elector of Bavaria one day during the siege of 
 Namur, while a British regiment was carrying the 
 outworks on one side of the city. But they were 
 doing more than carrying earthworks. They were 
 fighting for the principles which their descendants
 
 WILLIAM OF ORANGE 115 
 
 crowned with everlasting glory at Trafalgar and 
 Waterloo. They were showing the soldiers and 
 generals of France, then held to be the best in the 
 world, the sort of stuff that they were made of, and 
 giving promise of future prowess that was soon to 
 be splendidly redeemed at Blenheim and Ramillies, 
 Oudenarde and Malplaquet. 
 
 It was a singular war, and by all the rules of war- 
 fare the issue should have been the reverse of what 
 it was. But again and again William's wonderful 
 genius and indomitable persistence snatched victory 
 out of defeat, and turned disaster into advantage, 
 until at last the Grand Monarch himself had to 
 confess the power of the enemy whom he had once 
 thought so insignificant, and the signing of the 
 Treaty of Ryswick left William triumphant if 
 somewhat dissatisfied. 
 
 The results would no doubt have been much 
 greater if William could have had his own way, 
 and if the strife of parties in the British Parlia- 
 ment had not so sorely crippled him. But at leas 
 he had the satisfaction of knowing before he died 
 that, whereas a few months before the French men- 
 of-war had with impunity insulted and threatened the 
 English coasts, and landed a small army on Irish 
 soil, a few months afterwards every invader hah 
 been driven from British ground, and the French 
 fleet almost destroyed, while the Mediterranean, on 
 which British ships had sailed only by sufferance, 
 was now well on the way to becoming a British lake.
 
 u6 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 And yet, in spite of all the triumphs that he had 
 won over so many difficulties and so many dangers, 
 and in spite of the consciousness of work well 
 and nobly, if quietly and unostentatiously, done, 
 William's last days, like those of many another 
 man who has deserved well of the world, were 
 full of sorrow and suffering. 
 
 The death of his now adored queen had so shaken 
 his mighty nature that for some days his reason 
 was despaired of, and there can be no doubt but 
 that it hastened his own end. And yet, weak and 
 far advanced in disease as he was when he went 
 out for that fatal ride from Kensington to Hampton 
 Court, he was even then going a-hunting. The 
 brutal Jacobite toast : " To the little gentleman in 
 black velvet who works underground ! " still serves 
 to remind us of the mole-hill over which his horse 
 stumbled and fell, breaking his rider's collar-bone, 
 and inflicting the death - wound which he had 
 escaped on a score of battle-fields. 
 
 His death was worthy of his life, for it was the 
 death of a brave, patient man and a Christian 
 gentleman. No doubt he himself would have 
 preferred to have died at the head of a charge, 
 or in the thick of an assault on a French fortress, 
 but his destiny ordered it otherwise, and the man 
 who had a hundred times faced death in the most 
 reckless fashion for the purpose of inspiring his 
 followers with his own courage and enthusiasm, 
 died quietly in his bed, leaving behind him the
 
 WILLIAM OF ORANGE 117 
 
 greatest work ever done by an individual British 
 sovereign, and a fame which, but for the one 
 dark and inexplicable blot of Glencoe, is as fairly 
 entitled to be called spotless as that of any man 
 who ever sat upon a throne and accomplished 
 great things with such means as came to his hand.
 
 VI 
 JAMES COOK, 
 
 CIRC UMNA VI G A TOR
 
 VI 
 JAMES COOK 
 
 ONCE more I am going to ask you to take 
 your seat with me on the ideal equivalent 
 of the Magic Carpet and skim across another time- 
 gulf some half-century wide. This time we alight 
 on the morning of Monday, July 5, 1742, before 
 the door of a double-fronted shop, one side of which 
 is devoted to the sale of groceries and the other to 
 the drapery business. This shop is situate in a 
 little village on the Yorkshire coast a few miles 
 from Whitby, Staithes, or more exactly The 
 Staithes, so called from the local name for a pier 
 or sea-wall of wood jutting out a few feet into the 
 German Ocean, and built partly to protect the 
 little bay from the North Sea rollers and partly 
 to afford accommodation for the fishing-boats and 
 colliers. 
 
 The shop belongs to a substantial citizen of 
 Staithes named Saunderson, and this morning Mr. 
 Saunderson is a very angry man. In fact, if we 
 go into the shop, which is not yet open, we shall 
 find him with a cane or some similar weapon in
 
 122 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 his hand, leaning behind the counter and hitting 
 blindly at a bed there is beneath it, shouting the 
 while sundry excellent maxims on the virtue of 
 early rising, especially modified for the benefit of 
 apprentices. 
 
 But no response comes from the bed, and Mr. 
 Saunderson stoops down to make closer investi- 
 gation. The bed is empty, and the fact dawns 
 on him that his last apprentice has followed the 
 example of all the others and run away to sea. It 
 was a very common event on the Yorkshire coast 
 in those days, but this particular running away was 
 destined to be a very memorable one for the world, 
 for the lad who, instead of being in the bed under 
 the counter, was just then striding rapidly away 
 over the fields to Whitby with one extra shirt and 
 a jack-knife for his sole possessions, was James 
 Cook, a name as dear to the lovers of the romance 
 of travel and adventure as Robinson Crusoe, and 
 one of infinitely more importance in the annals of 
 mankind. 
 
 In following his fortunes, so far as the brief limits 
 of such a sketch as this will permit, we shall bid a 
 perhaps welcome adieu for a while to the roar of 
 guns and the shock of battle, to the blaze of burn- 
 ing towns and the fierce cries ringing along the 
 decks of captured treasure-ships, to watch the con- 
 test of a clear head and a strong will against those 
 foes which may be overcome without bloodshed, 
 although not always without loss of life the hidden
 
 JAMES COOK 123 
 
 dangers of unknown oceans strewn with uncharted 
 reefs and shoals lying in wait for unwary keels, the 
 sudden hurricanes of the Tropics, and the storms 
 and fogs and the floating ice-navies of the far North 
 and South. It was these that Captain Cook went 
 out to fight and overcome, and in doing so to prove 
 eloquently that : 
 
 " Peace hath her victories no less renowned than war." 
 
 Nevertheless there are certain points of likeness 
 between James Cook, Geographer and Circum- 
 navigator, and that other Circumnavigator, Francis 
 Drake, Pirate and Scourge of Spain. Both 
 began life as ship-boys, and both rose, by sheer 
 ability and strength of purpose, far above their 
 original station in life to positions of command 
 in the service of their country. Both were men 
 of iron will, far-reaching design, unshakeable 
 self-reliance, and passionate temper, and, lastly, 
 both were possessed by that irresistible spirit of 
 roving and adventure which, when it once seizes a 
 man, but seldom lets him rest in peace. In short, 
 though the vocation of one was piracy and war, and 
 that of the other the peaceful, but none the less 
 adventurous service of science, both were stamped 
 with the supreme and essential characteristics of the 
 Empire- Maker. 
 
 Naturally, the world had changed a good deal by 
 the time James Cook started out to add so enor- 
 mously to men's knowledge of it. Spain had fallen
 
 124 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 from her high estate and was living in slothful ease 
 on the dregs and lees of that strong wine which 
 she had drunk to intoxication in the golden days 
 of Cortez and Pizarro. But Britain, no longer only 
 England, had become Great Britain, and was fast 
 expanding into Greater Britain. Cowley, Dampier, 
 Clapperton and Anson had circumnavigated the 
 globe more than once, and people were beginning 
 to have something like a definite notion of how 
 very big a place was this world which now seems 
 so small to us. The Imperial Idea was beginning 
 to take hold of men's minds. They wanted to 
 know, not so much how big the world was, but 
 what other unknown lands might be lying waiting 
 for the discoverer, hidden away among the vast 
 expanses which were still an utter blank upon the 
 map. 
 
 The maritime nations of the world, too, and 
 Britain, now foremost among them, had uncon- 
 sciously taken a very great stride along the path- 
 way of real progress, and they were beginning to 
 grasp the higher ideal of colonisation as distin- 
 guished from mere conquest, and to James Cook 
 belongs the high honour, if not of discovering, at 
 least of first definitely locating and in part map- 
 ping out the greatest of all the British colonies. 
 
 Indeed, it may be said that, in sober fact, he 
 added a whole continent to the British Empire, 
 and that without the striking of a single blow or 
 the loss of a single life in battle.
 
 JAMES COOK 125 
 
 The first few years of James Cook's seafaring life 
 were eventless, just as Francis Drake's were, but 
 for all that he, like Gloriana's Little Pirate, was 
 doing that minor but no less essential part of his 
 life-work which was the necessary preparation for 
 the greater. He was doing his work first as ship's 
 boy, then as sailor before the mast, then as second 
 mate, first mate, and so on up the laborious ladder 
 which was to lead him in the end to an unequalled 
 eminence among mariners. 
 
 Thus for thirteen years he served what may be 
 called his apprenticeship to his life's work ; learn- 
 ing in the most practical of all schools, a North Sea 
 collier of the eighteenth century, not only the science 
 of seamanship in all its details, but also what was 
 hardly less important that science of taking things 
 as they came, of looking upon hardship, privation 
 and danger as the commonplaces of a seaman's life, 
 incidents in his day's work, as it were, and as such 
 scarcely worth even the mention, and hence much 
 less worth troubling about. 
 
 A curiously instructive fact strikes one in con- 
 trasting Captain Cook's own account of his voyages 
 with those of others, such as Anderson and Gilbert, 
 who sailed with him. They expatiate largely on 
 the miseries of heat and cold, ice and mist, the 
 almost uneatable character of the sea-fare of those 
 days, disease among the crew, and so on ; but 
 Captain Cook hardly ever mentions them, saving 
 only the scurvy, of which more hereafter.
 
 126 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 But there was something else that James Cook 
 had already learnt long ago while he was yet a boy. 
 When he was a lad of six or seven he had been 
 set to work on a farm belonging to a man named 
 William Walker, and this William had a wife 
 named Mary who, taking a fancy to the lad, taught 
 him his letters and encouraged him to read, and 
 so, without knowing it, put into his hands the 
 talisman which was to win his way to future great- 
 ness. She not only aroused in him that passion 
 for reading which distinguished him among the 
 sailors of his time, but she gave him what might 
 have been the only means of gratifying it, for not 
 every farm-lad and ship's-boy of the middle of the 
 eighteenth century had learnt, or ever did learn, 
 to read and write. 
 
 It may have been that James Cook's latent 
 ambition had never looked beyond the possibility 
 of becoming master of one of the vessels of which 
 he had been mate, and it is also possible that he 
 might never in reality have been anything more, 
 but it so happened that his ship, the Friendship, 
 was lying in London river in May, 1756, and that 
 at the same time the war with France, which had 
 been brewing for a year, broke out. 
 
 As usual the Press Gang set instantly to work, 
 and now came Cook's chance. He was mate of 
 a ship, albeit only a collier brig ; still he was a 
 thorough seaman, an excellent navigator, and, more 
 than that, he seems to have known something of
 
 JAMES COOK 127 
 
 the theory as well as the practice of his science. 
 These accomplishments, however, did not put him 
 beyond the reach of the Press Gang. 
 
 Now, in those days there were two ranks of 
 seamen before the mast in the King's navy the 
 pressed man, who might be anything from a raw 
 land-lubber to an escaped convict, and the volun- 
 teer, who was probably and usually a good sailor, 
 if not something better, as Cook was, and he, 
 guided either by inspiration or deliberate resolve, 
 eluded the Press Gang by offering himself as a 
 volunteer, and so in due course took his rating as 
 able-seaman before the mast on board his Majesty's 
 frigate Eagle, of sixty guns, of which shortly after- 
 wards the good genius of his life, Sir Hugh Palliser, 
 was appointed captain. 
 
 During the next four years there was fighting, 
 but we have no record of any share that Cook took 
 in it. What we do know is that by the time he 
 was thirty he had risen to the rank of master of 
 the Mercury, a King's ship which went with the 
 fleet to the St. Lawrence at a very critical juncture 
 in British colonial history. 
 
 So far it would appear that he had worked him- 
 self up by sheer ability and industry, but now his 
 chance was to come. The river St. Lawrence at 
 that time had never been surveyed, and it was 
 absolutely necessary that soundings should be taken 
 and the river correctly charted before the fleet could 
 go in and with its guns cover Wolfe's attack on
 
 Quebec. The all-important work was entrusted to 
 the master of the Mercury, and although the river 
 was swarming with the canoes of hostile Indians in 
 the service of the French, and though he had to 
 do his work at night, he did it so thoroughly that 
 not only did the fleet go in and out again with 
 perfect safety, but the work has needed but little 
 re-doing from that day to this. 
 
 Thus did James Cook, not as sailor or fighting- 
 man, but as good mariner and skilful workman play 
 his first part as Empire-Maker, and in an unosten- 
 tatious fashion contribute his share towards the 
 capture of Quebec and the acquisition of one of 
 the widest and fairest portions of Greater Britain. 
 
 He was at this time, as has been said, only thirty. 
 As regards the outer aspect of the man he stood 
 something over six feet, spare, hard, and active. 
 His face was a good one and suited to the man, 
 broad forehead, bright, brown, well-set eyes, yet 
 rather small, a long, well-shaped nose with good 
 nostrils, a firm mouth, and full, strong chin. 
 
 In short, his best portraits show you just the 
 kind of man you would expect Captain Cook to be. 
 For the rest he was a man of iron frame, tireless 
 at work, resting only when it was a physical neces- 
 sity, with few friends and fewer confidants, cool of 
 judgment save during his rare and deplorable fits 
 of passion, self-contained and self-reliant just such 
 a sea-king, in short, as we may imagine Heaven to 
 have commissioned to carry the British flag three
 
 JAMES COOK 129 
 
 times round the world and to the uttermost parts 
 of the known earth, and to plant it on lands which 
 until then no white man's eye had seen or foot had 
 trodden. 
 
 In the same year Cook was promoted from the 
 Mercury to the Northumberland, the Admiral's 
 flag-ship, and in her he came back to England, and 
 at St. Margaret's Church, Barking, married Elizabeth 
 Batts, a young lady of great beauty and of social 
 standing far above that of the grocer's apprentice 
 and collier's knockabout boy, but not above that 
 of the Master of a King's ship. His married life 
 lasted some seventeen years, and of these he spent 
 a little over four in the enjoyment of the delights of 
 home. 
 
 For the next four years or so he was regularly 
 employed in surveying and exploring work off the 
 Atlantic coast of America, and this of itself shows 
 that he had already made his mark in his chosen 
 profession. But much greater things were now to 
 be in store for him. It will be remembered how 
 Drake, when he first saw the smooth waters of the 
 Pacific, prayed God that He would give him life 
 and leave to sail an English ship on its waters. 
 That prayer had been granted, and his and many 
 another English ship had crossed the great Sea of 
 the South. 
 
 Meanwhile the realised dream of El Dorado had 
 been replaced in men's minds by another, even 
 more vast, shadowy, and splendid. This was the 
 
 10
 
 130 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 dream of the Great Southern Continent, and in 
 this imagination revelled and ran riot. Grave 
 scientists, too, demonstrated beyond all doubt that 
 there must be such a land far away to the south 
 since how, without it as a counterpoise to the con- 
 tinents of the north, was the rolling world to be 
 kept in equilibrium ? 
 
 So they took it for granted, laid it down upon 
 the maps, and wrote glowing descriptions ot the 
 varieties of climate, the splendour of scenery, the 
 wealth of treasures and the strange peoples and 
 animals that it must of necessity contain. Above 
 all, it would be a new El Dorado which would not 
 be under the control of Spain. 
 
 What more could men want, unless indeed it was 
 the actual discovery of the Terra Incognita Australis? 
 This was the new world of which Cook was to be 
 the Columbus. Others had seen parts of it just as 
 others had seen parts of America before the great 
 Genoese reached the West Indies, but he was the 
 man who was to do the work of putting its existence 
 beyond all doubt. 
 
 The Royal Society found that there would be a 
 transit of Venus in the year 1 769, and that it would 
 be best observed from some point in the great 
 Southern Ocean, say Amsterdam Island or the 
 Marquesas Group, lately discovered by the Dutch 
 and Portuguese, and as the result of representations 
 made to the King, an expedition was set on foot to 
 cariy out suitable persons to observe it. Of this
 
 JAMES COOK 131 
 
 expedition James Cook, raised from the rank of 
 master to that of lieutenant, was placed in com- 
 mand. On his own recommendation the ship chosen 
 for the purpose was the Endeavour, a Whitby- 
 built craft of 370 tons, broad of bow and stern and 
 fairly light of draft, and built for strength and en- 
 durance rather than speed. 
 
 She sailed, carrying a complement all told of 
 eighty-five men, from Plymouth on August 26, 
 1768, which as Cook's latest biographer happily 
 remarks, was a Friday, and the starting-day of 
 what was, all things considered, the most successful 
 voyage of discovery ever made. Just before she 
 sailed Captain Wallace had come back bringing the 
 news of the discovery of Otaheite, otherwise known 
 as Tahiti, and as this island was considered a more 
 favourable position, Captain Cook, as we may now 
 fairly call him, was ordered to proceed there first. 
 
 It is of course utterly out of the question to 
 attempt any connected account even of one voyage 
 round the world, let alone three, within such limits 
 as these, therefore I cannot do better than let the 
 great navigator describe his achievements, as he 
 actually did, in three modest paragraphs : 
 
 " I endeavoured to make a direct course to 
 Otaheite" (this was after he had crossed the Atlantic 
 and doubled the Horn, which doubling, by the way, 
 took thirty-three days), "and in part succeeded, but 
 I made no discovery till I got within the Tropic, 
 where I fell in with Lagoon Island, The Groups,
 
 132 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 Verde Island, Chain Island, and on the i3th of 
 April arrived at Otaheite, where I remained three 
 months, during which time the observations on the 
 transit were taken. 
 
 " I then left it, discovered and visited the Society 
 Islands and Ohetoroa ; thence proceeded to the 
 south till I arrived in latitude 40*22 south, longitude 
 147*29 east, then on the 6th of October, fell in with 
 the east side of New Zealand. 
 
 " I continued exploring the coast of this country 
 till the 3ist of March, 1770, when I quitted it and 
 proceeded to New Holland ; and having surveyed 
 the eastern coast of that vast country, which part 
 had never before been visited, I passed between 
 its northern extremity and New Guinea, and landed 
 on the latter, touched at the island of Savu, 
 Batavia, Cape of Good Hope, and St. Helena, 
 and arrived in England on the 2nd of July, 
 
 1771." 
 
 I have seldom come across such a masterpiece of 
 eloquent simplicity as this, but then, of course, 
 Cook's voyages were made before the days of the 
 lecture-exploiter and the Age of Booms. There is, 
 however, one remark that may be made on it. 
 What Cook calls New Holland we call Australia, 
 and Botany Bay, the first point he touched at, is 
 hard by Port Jackson, on the flowery shores of 
 which now stands the lovely capital of New South 
 Wales. Terra Incognita Australis was unknown 
 no longer, but the days when it was to prove itself
 
 JAMES COOK 133 
 
 even more golden than El Dorado were yet distant 
 nearly a hundred years. 
 
 If you would read the marvellous tale of frozen 
 lands and seas, of the sunlit coral-islands gemming 
 the sparkling waters as thickly as the stars stud the 
 Heavens, of the delights of Paradise and the 
 terrors of Nifflheim told and written by sundry 
 members of this expedition after their return, you 
 must go to your library and find them in the 
 originals, for there is no space to give them here. 
 Suffice it to say that, though somewhat prolix and 
 diffuse, you will, if you are blessed with an intelli- 
 gent taste for that kind of thing, find them more 
 delightful reading than any of the countless 
 romances whose writers have taken their materials 
 out of them. 
 
 But there is one circumstance which for the 
 honour of James Cook ought to be mentioned. 
 The curse of sea-voyaging in those days was 
 scurvy. Out of forty sick, nearly half of the little 
 company, no fewer than twenty-three died, and this 
 terrible fact set the captain thinking, with the result 
 that he, first of all mariners, grappled with and 
 conquered this worst of the dangers of the ocean. 
 If he had never done anything else he would have 
 deserved a niche in the Temple of Fame. In his 
 second voyage round the world, which lasted three 
 years and sixteen days, he only lost four men, three 
 of whom died by accident and the fourth not of 
 scurvy.
 
 134 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 The Circumnavigator was now promoted to the 
 rank of Commander, a modest enough reward for 
 the achievement of the greatest work of his genera- 
 tion. He remained ashore just a year, probably 
 the longest period he had ever spent on land since 
 he first went to sea. 
 
 During this time the publication of a collection 
 of travels started people talking about the Southern 
 Continent again. Captain Cook had found it, but 
 that didn't matter. His discovery was not splendid 
 enough by any means, so it was decided to send 
 another expedition, this time of two ships, " to com- 
 plete the discovery of the southern hemisphere " (!) 
 and Cook sailed again in command aboard the 
 Resolution of 462 tons having for consort the 
 Adventure of 336 tons. 
 
 They sailed on July 13, 1772, and on October 
 3Oth reached Table Bay a hundred and nine days, 
 think of that, you who take a run out to the Cape 
 and back again for a winter holiday ! Truly the 
 world was somewhat larger in those days. 
 
 From Cape Town they steered straight away for 
 the Southland on December loth they sighted for 
 the first time the ice-fringe of what we know now 
 to be the true Terra Incognita Australis. 
 
 The landsmen on board seem to have had a 
 dreadful time during this part of the voyage and 
 Foster, one of the naturalists of the expedition, 
 bewails " the gloomy uniformity with which they 
 had slowly passed dull hours, days and months in
 
 JAMES COOK 135 
 
 this desolate part of the world." What a change 
 it must have been from the rigours and horrors of 
 Antarctica to the paradisaical delights of Tahiti, 
 which, after surveying the coast of New Zealand 
 and deciding that it consisted of two islands and 
 not one, the expedition reached on the i6th of the 
 following August. 
 
 There is perhaps no other spot on earth which 
 so completely fulfils one's ideas of what Paradise 
 ought to be as this same island of Tahiti even now, 
 but what must it have been in those days, when 
 white men first saw it in all the beauty and sim- 
 plicity of its primeval innocence. Now, alas, it is 
 very different, cursed by the diseases and vices of 
 civilisation and afflicted by a cast-iron regime which 
 the people seem to think a little worse than death, 
 since they are dying as fast as they can to get away 
 from it. 
 
 After this again New Zealand was visited, and 
 once more the two ships plunged into the icy soli- 
 tudes of Antarctica, only to return again, baffled by 
 the impenetrable ice-wall. From here the ships 
 steered northwards for Easter Island and Crusoe's 
 Island. It is noteworthy that on the way Captain 
 Cook, the great Medicine Man of the sailors, him- 
 self fell sick, and that, for want of anything better, 
 " a dog was killed to make soup for him " from 
 which it will be seen that voyages of discovery 
 were not exactly picnics in his time. 
 
 From Juan Fernandez he steered for the Mar-
 
 136 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 quesas again, once more visited New Zealand, and 
 once more his sea-worn crews revelled in the un- 
 restrained delights of Tahiti. Then again to the 
 south, this time not to rest until the whole circle of 
 the Southern hemisphere had been made without 
 the finding of any other southern continent than the 
 unapproachable Antarctica, and so in due course 
 and without mishap came the Sunday morning, 
 July 30, 1775, when the Resolution and the Adven- 
 ture, having well vindicated their names, dropped 
 their willing anchors into the waters of Spithead. 
 
 More honours, though not of the nineteenth- 
 century-boom order, were now most justly be- 
 stowed on the Circumnavigator. He was promoted 
 to the rank of Post-Captain in the Navy, and made 
 a Captain of Greenwich Hospital, a post which 
 carried with it a home and honourable retirement 
 for the rest of his life of which he was the very 
 last man in the world to avail himself. He was 
 also elected Fellow of the Royal Society, and pre- 
 sented with the gold medal for his treatment of scurvy. 
 
 Captain Cook as sailor, as scientific navigator, 
 and as explorer was now at the height of his fame. 
 He was forty-eight years old, and had spent thirty- 
 four years at sea, and it is no exaggeration to 
 say that during this time he had added more 
 geographical knowledge to the history of the world 
 than any one had ever done before, and had 
 probably covered a larger portion of its surface. 
 He had at once proved and disproved the dream of
 
 JAMES COOK 137 
 
 the Southern Continent, and, potentially speaking, 
 he had added enormous areas to the ever-growing 
 realms of Greater Britain. 
 
 He might well have rested on such laurels as 
 these, but there was more work for him to do, and 
 he went to do it. One of the greatest questions of 
 the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, 
 was the possibility of the North- West Passage from 
 the Atlantic to the Pacific. So far every attempt 
 had ended in failure, and generally in disaster, but 
 now, when men's minds were full of the wonders 
 Captain Cook had achieved, there arose another 
 question : Might not a North-East passage from 
 the Pacific to the Atlantic be possible, and, if so, 
 who better to try it than the great Circumnavigator? 
 An expedition was promptly decided on. Captain 
 Cook was not offered the command, as the Govern- 
 ment probably and rightly thought he had won his 
 laurels. But one fatal evening he dined with Lord 
 Sandwich, the promoter of the expedition, and at 
 table he met his old patron, Sir Hugh Palliser, and 
 his friend, Mr. Stephens, Secretary to the Ad- 
 miralty. Ostensibly the object of the dinner was to 
 consult him as to the best leader for the new 
 venture, but the moment the subject was broached 
 the unquenchable passion for travel blazed up again, 
 and the great Navigator rose to his feet and said 
 gravely : 
 
 " My lord and gentlemen, if you will have me I 
 will go myself."
 
 133 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 So was decided the fatal voyage which was 
 destined to end a glorious and almost blameless 
 career by an ignoble and unworthy death. 
 
 The expedition consisted of the old Resolution 
 and the Discovery, a vessel of three hundred tons. 
 The voyage lasted four years and nine months, but 
 the loss of life by sickness was only five men, of 
 whom three were ill when they started. A good 
 deal of the old ground was gone over, more islands 
 were discovered, more unknown coasts surveyed. 
 Fair Tahiti was visited once more, and the expedi- 
 tion, so far as its principal object was concerned, 
 came to an end, as the search for the Southern 
 Continent had done, in a way blocked by impene- 
 trable barriers of ice this time the ice of the North. 
 
 Thus turned back, they steered southward, and 
 on December i, 1778, they discovered Hawai, 
 which discovery the great Navigator in his last 
 written words somewhat strangely says, "seemed in 
 many respects to be the most important that had 
 hitherto been made by Europeans throughout the 
 extent of the Pacific Ocean." 
 
 It was here, as all the world knows, that he met 
 his death, and the story of it is, unhappily, at sad 
 variance with that of his life. 
 
 The one blemish on Captain Cook's otherwise 
 noble character was a liability to outbursts of un- 
 governable temper, and during these he seems to 
 have behaved on more occasions than one in a 
 manner almost befitting one of the old buccaneers.
 
 JAMES COOK 139 
 
 For instance, he would punish paltry thefts by 
 cutting off the ears of the islanders, firing small 
 shot at them as they swam to the shore, chasing 
 them in boats, and ordering his men to strike and 
 stab them with boat-hooks as they struggled out of 
 the way. On one occasion he punished a Kanaka 
 who had pilfered some trifle by " making two cuts 
 upon his arm to the bone, one across and the other 
 close below his shoulder." 
 
 Again, at the island of Eimeo, because a goat 
 was stolen, he landed thirty-five armed men, 
 blockaded the island with armed boats, and burnt 
 every house and canoe that he came across, and, as 
 an eye-witness says, " several women and old men 
 still remained by the houses, whose lamentations 
 were very great, but all their tears and entreaties 
 could not move Captain Cook to desist in the 
 smallest degree from those cruel ravages." 
 
 Now it was undoubtedly this anger-madness of 
 his, combined with an equally incomprehensible act 
 of duplicity, which cost him his life. When he 
 returned from his attempt to find the North-East 
 passage and landed at Hawai, he was hailed by the 
 natives as Lono, a god who had disappeared ages 
 before, saying that he would return in huge canoes 
 with cocoa-nut trees for masts. Now unhappily 
 there is no doubt that Captain Cook, for some 
 reason or other, took advantage of this belief. Not 
 only did he not undeceive the natives, but he per- 
 mitted divine honours to be paid to him.
 
 140 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 From personal knowledge of the Pacific Islanders 
 I am able to say that in their pristine state they 
 look upon deception and lying as the gravest of 
 crimes, and usually punish the'm with death, and 
 Captain Cook, with his vast experience of them, 
 must have known this also, and therefore he must 
 have been fully aware that the moment anything 
 happened to show the natives that he was not a 
 god, his life would not be worth a moment's 
 purchase. 
 
 Shortly after this the ships sailed, and it would 
 have been well for Cook, who had been guilty of 
 some very high-handed acts, if he had never 
 returned. But they came back a week afterwards 
 to find the island under the mysterious tabu which 
 is the Kanaka equivalent for an interdict, and by far 
 the most sacred institution known to the Poly- 
 nesians. Some of his marines broke this tabu in 
 the most flagrant fashion. In revenge one of the 
 Discovery's cutters was stolen. When anything of 
 this sort happened Captain Cook was accustomed 
 to inveigle a chief or two on board his ship and 
 keep them there till the thing stolen was restored. 
 He tried to do this with the King of Hawai, but 
 the people suspected his design, and at the critical 
 moment news came that a canoe had been burnt 
 and a chief killed. The King refused to go another 
 step, and then Captain Cook, who was armed with 
 a hanger and a double-barrelled gun, did a terribly 
 foolish thing for such a man to do.
 
 MISSED HIM AND KILLED ANOTHER MAN BEHIND HIM. 
 (Page 141.)
 
 JAMES COOK 141 
 
 He began to walk away to his boat, turning his 
 back on the armed and angry natives. To do so 
 was to invite certain death, and one of the warriors 
 attacked him with his spear. He turned and shot 
 at the man, missed him, and killed another man 
 behind him. A shower of stones followed, and the 
 marines fired on the natives. 
 
 Cook appears now to have seen the seriousness 
 of the situation, and signalled to those in the boat 
 to stop firing. While he was doing this a chief ran 
 up and drove his spear through his body. Some 
 accounts say that it was an iron dagger, others that 
 he was clubbed on the head simultaneously. At 
 any rate he staggered forward and fell face down- 
 wards in the water, on which the natives " imme- 
 diately leapt in after and kept him under for a few 
 minutes, then hauled him out upon the rocks and 
 beat his head against them several times, so that 
 there is no doubt but that he quickly expired." 
 
 Such was the end of the great Circumnavigator, 
 the greatest seaman of his time, and a man honoured 
 wherever the science of navigation was known. It 
 was a miserable end to such a brilliant career, 
 miserable as was that of the great Magellan, who 
 lost his life and the deathless honour of being the 
 first sea-captain to sail round the world in just such 
 a petty and ignoble squabble on the beach of a 
 lonely islet in the Phillipines. 
 
 But though his death was ignoble, it can detract 
 nothing from the splendour of his life's work. He
 
 142 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 was not perfect no great man is and it is only 
 the mournful truth to say that the meanest and 
 most unlovable trait in his character was the direct 
 and culpable cause of his death. Among sailors 
 this is already forgotten, and they only remember 
 him, as they are well warranted in doing, as the 
 greatest of English mariners, and the man who 
 conquered their most terrible enemy and their 
 deadliest destroyer.
 
 VII 
 LORD CLIVE, 
 
 QUILL-DRIVER AND CONQUEROR
 
 VII 
 LORD CLIVE 
 
 T T is one of the distinctions of Robert Clive to 
 be at once the model of all bad boys and the 
 forlorn hope of their despairing fathers. He was 
 probably the very worst boy that ever became a 
 really great man. Of his early youth there is 
 absolutely nothing good to be said, saving only 
 the fact that he was possessed of that brute, bull- 
 dog courage which thousands of English boys, 
 whose names have never been heard beyond 
 their native towns, have possessed in common 
 with him. 
 
 He was idle, passionate, aggressive, not over 
 truthful, and of a distinctly turbulent, not to say 
 piratical disposition. For instance, he had not 
 reached his teens before he established a sort of 
 juvenile reign of terror in the sleepy old town of 
 Market Drayton, which had at once the misfortune 
 and the honour of being his birthplace. 
 
 Even the school-books IILV^ not omitted to tell 
 us how the boy became the father of the future 
 pirate and Empire- Maker, by organising the kin-
 
 146 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 dred spirits of the town into a buccaneering band, 
 as captain of which he levied blackmail in the 
 shape of nuts, . apples, sweatmeats, and even coin 
 of the realm on the shopkeepers. 
 
 If the tribute were, punctually paid, well and good; 
 but if one rebelled or defaulted, the odds were that 
 he very soon had a heavy bill to pay for window- 
 repairing, or else there would be sudden deaths in 
 his fowl-house, or, peradventure, his errand-boy, if 
 not an accomplice of the gang, would return pre- 
 maturely from his rounds with his goods missing 
 and undelivered, and his person in a somewhat 
 battered and dishevelled condition. 
 
 The most respectable feat that he appears to have 
 accomplished in these days would, after all, appear 
 to be the climbing of the lofty church steeple, and 
 his enjoyment on that dizzy eminence of the horror 
 and consternation of the townsfolk. This feat was, 
 in its way, as characteristic of the man that was to 
 be as was his first essay in world-piracy, for later on 
 we shall see how he reached a far more dizzy emin- 
 ence than this and kept his head as few others would 
 have done. 
 
 His school life appears to have been as unsatis- 
 factory as his home life. He was sent to academy 
 after academy, and at each, ushers and pedagogues 
 struggled with him in vain although of itself this 
 fact was not greatly to his discredit, since the 
 methods of alleged education in the first half of the 
 eighteenth century were even more unnatural than
 
 LORD CLIVE 147 
 
 they are now. Still, the fact remains that he was a 
 hopeless dunce, self-willed and idle, and of an un- 
 lovable disposition, redeemed only by the one good 
 quality of intrepid pluck. 
 
 One of his uncles, in a family letter, says, semi- 
 prophetically of him : " Fighting, to which he is out 
 of measure addicted, gives his temper such a fierce- 
 ness and imperiousness that it flies out on every 
 trifling occasion." 
 
 It is also said that one of his schoolmasters saw 
 signs of future greatness in the dullard of whom 
 neither he nor any of his brethren could make even 
 a presentable schoolboy, but this is probably a story 
 of the " I told you so" order, possibly invented by 
 the worthy pedagogue some time after the event. 
 Be this, however, as it may, the fact is that in the 
 end the last of the pedagogues seems to have thrown 
 the job up in despair and returned him back on his 
 father's hands as a hopelessly hard case. 
 
 Now it so happened that in those days there was 
 a refuge for the destitute, or perhaps it would be 
 more correct to say the ne'er-do-well, which in these 
 days is hardly represented by any portion of our 
 Colonial Empire. 
 
 If there appeared to be no chance of a lad doing 
 anything decent at home ; if his parents were too 
 poor to buy him a commission in the Army, and 
 hadn't interest enough to get him into the Navy, 
 and if he were, as Clive undoubtedly was, too much 
 of a dunce to have a chance in any other respect-
 
 148 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 able profession, the last thing that could be done for 
 him was to get him a writership in the service of the 
 East India Company. 
 
 If this could be done, two prospects were open to 
 him. He would die of fever in a year or two, after 
 a hard struggle to live upon his miserable pay, or he 
 would "shake the Pagoda Tree," and come home a 
 wealthy nabob, with a brick-dust complexion, a sun- 
 dried and somewhat shrivelled conscience, and a 
 liver perpetually on strike. As it happened, how- 
 ever, Robert Clive availed himself of neither of 
 these prospects, since the mysterious Fates had a 
 third one in store for him. 
 
 Certainly they were very mysterious Fates which 
 presided over the early fortunes of the future Con- 
 queror of India, and upon none of their darlings 
 have they frowned so blackly and then suddenly 
 turned round and smiled so brightly as upon the 
 scapegrace of Market Drayton. 
 
 To begin with, the voyage to India in those days, 
 even for people with large means, was a weary and 
 miserable business. Ocean greyhounds, the Suez 
 Canal, and the Peninsular Railway, were undreamt 
 of; and the heavy Indiamen lumbered toilfully 
 round the Cape, across the Indian Ocean, and up 
 the Bay of Bengal, taking their time about it 
 sometimes six months, sometimes a year, or more. 
 In Clive's case it was more, for his ship first crossed 
 the Atlantic to the Brazils, and stopped there for 
 some months. Here he spent all his money, and
 
 LORD CLIVE 149 
 
 got in return a smattering of Portuguese, which he 
 afterwards found useful. 
 
 When he eventually landed on the surf-beaten 
 beach of Madras, he was not only penniless but in 
 debt. The only person of influence to whom he 
 had an introduction had left for England. His 
 duties were both laborious and distasteful. He 
 had no friends and was too shy and awkwardly 
 proud to make any, and for months he was veri- 
 tably a stranger in a strange land, and, to crown 
 all, he became wretchedly ill. 
 
 How mournful he really felt his position to be, 
 and how far the stern discipline of misery had 
 already softened his intractable disposition, may 
 be seen from one of his letters home, in which 
 he says : 
 
 " I have not enjoyed one happy day since I left 
 my native country. If I should be so far blest as 
 to revisit it again, but more especially Manchester " 
 (this, by the way, was his mother's native place) 
 " the centre of all my wishes, all that I could hope 
 o/r desire for would be presented before me in one 
 view." 
 
 How little did the despairing lad dream as he 
 wrote thus in some interval of his weary drudgery 
 that when he did revisit his native land it would be 
 as a conqueror, laurel-crowned, and hailed as one 
 worthy to rank with the first soldiers of his age ! 
 
 But, bright as his fortune was to be, he appears 
 just now to have been doing very little to deserve
 
 150 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 it. Macaulay tells us, in that brilliant essay of his, 
 that he behaved just as badly to his official superiors 
 as he had done to his schoolmasters, and came several 
 times very near to being dismissed, and at length, so 
 heavily did sickness of body and weariness of soul 
 lie upon him, that twice in quick succession he 
 attempted to blow his brains out, and twice the 
 pistol missed fire. 
 
 If those had been the days of central-fire, self- 
 cocking revolvers, instead of flint-lock pistols, the 
 history of Asia would have been changed, and what 
 is now our Indian Empire would probably have been 
 a French possession. 
 
 It will be necessary just here to quote a little 
 history with a view to seeing how matters stood in 
 India at the time when Clive, as it is said, flung 
 away the second useless pistol, and, like Wallen- 
 stein, exclaimed that after all he must have been 
 born for something great. 
 
 The map of India then was very different to what 
 it is now. There was no red about it at all. In the 
 East, France was practically mistress of the seas, 
 whatever she might be elsewhere. The British flag 
 only flew over one spot, and that only by sufferance. 
 This was the little trading settlement of Madras, 
 which was rented from the Nabob of the Carnatic, 
 who was only the deputy of the deputy of the once 
 mighty prince whom Europe knew vaguely as the 
 Great Mogul. 
 
 Fort St. George and Fort St. David were mere
 
 LORD CLIVE 151 
 
 parodies of military stations, and the nucleus of the 
 army which was to conquer the whole Peninsula 
 consisted chiefly of half-trained natives, miscel- 
 laneously armed with bows and arrows, swords and 
 bucklers, and here and there a firelock. On the 
 other hand, France possessed the Island of Mau- 
 ritius and the town and district of Pondicherry, the 
 former governed by Labourdonnais and the latter 
 by Dupleix, both men of great capacity and still 
 greater ambition. 
 
 France and England were just then at war in 
 Europe, and Labourdonnais thought it a good time 
 to crush English trade in India while it was yet in 
 its infancy, so, in spite of all the British East Indian 
 fleet could do to stop him, he appeared with his ships 
 off Madras, landed a large body of troops, forced 
 Fort St. George to surrender, and hoisted the 
 French flag on its battlements. 
 
 Happily, this roused the jealousy of Dupleix. 
 Labourdonnais had pledged his honour that Madras 
 should be restored on the payment of a moderate 
 ransom. Dupleix, who had already dreamt of being 
 sole master of India, was determined that it should 
 be wiped off the map altogether, so he accused his 
 fellow Governor of trespassing on his preserves, 
 and in the end succeeded in annulling his conditions 
 and marching the Governor of Fort St. George, 
 with the principal servants of the Company, in 
 triumph off to Pondicherry. 
 
 Unfortunately for him, there was one whom he
 
 152 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 did not take, not a principal servant by any means, 
 only an insignificant, underpaid quill-driver, who 
 had slipped out of the town disguised as a Mussul- 
 man, and yet Dupleix would have made a very 
 good bargain if he could have exchanged all his 
 other prisoners of war for him. 
 
 Clive reached Fort St. David, a dependency of 
 Fort St. George, in safety, and there, taking advan- 
 tage of the anger roused by this gross breach of 
 faith, he exchanged the pen for the sword, and the 
 writer became an ensign in the East India Com- 
 pany's army, such as it was. 
 
 Scarcely, however, had he done so than peace 
 was made in Europe, and therefore in India. Clive, 
 no doubt in great disgust, was sent back to his 
 desk, but, happily for him and the British Empire, 
 not for long. Fortunately, too, submarine telegraphs 
 had not been invented then, and India was almost 
 always a year behind Europe, so Governor Dupleix 
 made up his mind to have a war on his own 
 account, and the prize of this war was to be, as 
 Macaulay puts it, " nothing less than the magnifi- 
 cent inheritance of the House of Tamerlane." 
 
 To this end he took such skilful advantage of the 
 disputes of the pretenders to the throne of Nizam al 
 Mulk, the last of the great Viceroys of the Deccan, 
 that within a very short time he secured the triumph 
 of Mirzapha Jung, his prottgd, and rose himself to 
 such a position that, in the name of this puppet, he 
 was the virtual ruler of thirty millions of people,
 
 LORD CLIVE 153 
 
 and master of the whole Carnatic, saving only the 
 city of Trichinopoly, which was all that was left 
 to Mohammed Ali, the candidate with whom the 
 English Company had sided in a half-hearted and 
 wholly futile fashion. 
 
 At this juncture, Clive, who was now twenty-five 
 years old, and who occupied a sort of hybrid post 
 with the title of Commissary of the forces, took 
 upon himself to represent to his superiors that 
 unless something very decided was done, the 
 French must invariably become Lords Paramount 
 of the whole Peninsula. They hadn't a notion 
 what was to be done, but Clive had, and the brazen 
 effrontery of his plan seems to have paralysed the 
 authorities into giving him a free hand. 
 
 The situation was this : The triumphant French- 
 man, believing his quickly-acquired dominion a per- 
 manent one, had raised a tall pillar to his own glory 
 on the site of his greatest victory, and round this 
 was growing up a city, the name of which in 
 English meant the City of the Victory of Dupleix. 
 Chunda Sahib, successor of Mirzapha, was besieging 
 Trichinopoly, supported by several hundred trained 
 French soldiers. Major Lawrence, commander of 
 the English garrison at Madras, had gone to Eng- 
 land, and the English Company possessed no officer 
 of proved ability. The natives, dazzled by the 
 rapid and brilliant triumphs of Dupleix, and re- 
 membering the times when they had seen his 
 colours flying over Fort St. George, looked with
 
 154 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 contemptuous pity on the English as a remnant of 
 feeble shopkeepers who were soon to be cast into 
 the sea. And so, in all probability, they would 
 have been if that historic pistol had gone off a few 
 years before. 
 
 Clive, viewing the situation with true military 
 genius, saw two facts : first, that it would be 
 ridiculous with the force at his disposal to attack 
 the besiegers of Trichinopoly ; and second, that, 
 if a dash were made at Arcot, the capital and 
 favourite residence of the Nabobs of the Carnatic, 
 which is rather less than a hundred miles inland 
 from Madras, the siege of Trichinopoly would 
 probably be raised, and so this he determined 
 to do. 
 
 His army consisted of two hundred English 
 soldiers and three hundred Sepoys, with eight 
 English officers, of whom only two had ever seen 
 an action. He made the journey by forced marches 
 through the thunder and lightning and rain of the 
 wet season, and so astounded the garrison of Arcot 
 by his utterly unexpected appearance before the 
 gates that they ran without striking a blow. 
 
 Clive now found himself master of a half-ruined 
 fort, which he at once proceeded to strengthen and 
 victual as best he might, well knowing that he 
 would have to fight for what he had got. Presently 
 the panic-stricken garrison came back, and brought 
 with it reinforcements which gave it the respectable 
 strength of three thousand men. In the middle of
 
 LORD CLIVE 155 
 
 the night on which they arrived and sat down 
 before the town to think matters over, Clive, with- 
 out waiting to be besieged as he should have 
 done by all the rules of Eastern warfare, marched 
 out, caught them napping, cut them to pieces, 
 and marched back again without losing a 
 man. 
 
 Naturally the news of such doings as this flew 
 fast to Trichinopoly and Pondicherry, and clearly 
 something had to be done to crush this insolent 
 upstart before he gave any further trouble. To this 
 end four thousand men were sent by Chunda Sahib, 
 under his son Rajah, and by the time these reached 
 the walls of the old fort they had been increased by 
 reinforcements to ten thousand, and had, moreover, 
 been joined by a detachment of a hundred and fifty 
 French soldiers whom Dupleix had dispatched in 
 hot haste from Pondicherry. 
 
 As has been said, the place they had come to 
 attack was a half-ruined old fort, with dry ditches 
 and hardly any defences worth serious mention, and 
 its garrison by this time consisted only of a hundred 
 and twenty Englishmen and two hundred Sepoys. 
 Four of the eight officers were dead, and the com- 
 mander of what looked very like a forlorn hope was 
 an ex-quill-driver twenty-five years old. 
 
 And yet for fifty days and nights the besiegers 
 hurled themselves in vain against the rotten and 
 crumbling battlements behind which that dauntless 
 handful of half-starved men had made up their
 
 156 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 minds either to stand till help came, or to fall like 
 the heroes that they were. 
 
 The confidence and affection which the gallant 
 young commander inspired in his men European 
 and native alike during this terrible time is one of 
 the most splendid tributes to his fame. When there 
 was nothing left but rice to live and fight on, the 
 very Sepoys came to him of their own will to ask 
 that all the grain should be given to the Europeans, 
 who wanted more nourishment than they did. As 
 for them, they would gladly be content with the 
 water that it was boiled in ! Men like this are bad 
 to beat, and so Rajah Sahib found in spite of all 
 his enormous advantages. 
 
 But the splendid defence of Arcot had by this 
 time done something more than hold the French 
 and their allies in check. One Morari Row, the 
 chief of a body of six thousand Mahrattas the 
 bandit ancestors of some of the finest soldiery that 
 now fights under the flag of Britain had been 
 hired to defend Mohammed AH against his enemies, 
 but so far, instead of helping, he had been waiting 
 to see which way the cat would jump. His per- 
 sonal experience of the British had taught him that, 
 if they were not dogs or old women, they were 
 seemingly only fit for the bazaar and the counting- 
 house, and certainly no worthy allies for a race of 
 warriors. But now the gallantry of Clive and his 
 men was ringing all through the Carnatic, and 
 Morari swore by all his gods that, since the English
 
 LORD CLIVE 157 
 
 really could fight after all, and were able to help 
 themselves to such purpose, he hadn't the slightest 
 objection to helping them. 
 
 Having decided this in his own prudent mind, he 
 gave his warriors orders to march, and no sooner 
 
 o 
 
 did it transpire that their objective was the sorely 
 beleaguered fortress of Arcot than Rajah Sahib 
 came to the conclusion that he had got a harder 
 nut between his teeth than his jaws could crack, 
 and so he made overtures of peace in the true 
 Oriental style that is to say, he offered a huge 
 bribe for an unconditional surrender, and accom- 
 panied the offer with a threat of general assault and 
 subsequent extermination if the offer were refused. 
 The young quill-driver's reply was characteristic. 
 
 " Tell Rajah Sahib," he said to the envoy, "that 
 I refuse his bribe with as much scorn as I receive 
 his threat. Tell him also that his master and father 
 is a usurper and his army a rabble, and bid him 
 beware how he brings them into a breach defended 
 by English soldiers.' 
 
 Rajah Sahib declined the warning, and prepared 
 for attack by making his fanatic followers gloriously 
 drunk with bhang and other assorted drugs. He 
 also selected the day of a great Moslem festival for 
 the assault, and enlisted the services of some 
 elephants, whose heads he covered with spiked 
 plates of iron, and these, when the attack was 
 delivered, were driven against the gates to act as 
 living battering-rams.
 
 iSS MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 But Clive had already foreseen that living batter- 
 ing-rams had the disadvantage of working both 
 ways, and so the elephants were received with such 
 a galling fire that, instead of charging the gates, 
 they turned round and made lanes through the 
 army behind them with distinctly demoralising 
 effect. 
 
 This was a bad beginning, but the end was 
 worse. Clive acted not only as general-in-com- 
 mand, but also as an ordinary gunner, and he 
 seems, moreover, to have pretty well filled all 
 the posts between. He worked as hard as any 
 soldier or Sepoy of them all. There were more 
 weapons than men to use them, so the rear ranks 
 loaded and primed the muskets, and passed them 
 up to the front as fast as they could be fired, and 
 Rajah Sahib speedily learnt what Clive had meant 
 by a breach defended by English soldiers, for the 
 fire was so fast and fierce that the more men that 
 he sent into the breach the more stopped there 
 and that was about all there was in it from his 
 point of view. 
 
 Three times the onset was repeated, and three 
 times the attacking swarms were mown down by 
 the leaden hail-storm that swept the breach, and 
 after the third time the Rajah and his merry men 
 had had enough of it and retreated to their lines. 
 
 The night passed in anxious watching, every 
 man in his place and every gun loaded, but their 
 last shot had been fired and the morning light
 
 INSTEAD OF CHARGING THEY TURNED ROUND AND MADE LANES 
 THROUGH THE ARMY BEHIND THEM. 
 
 158.)
 
 LORD CLIVE 159 
 
 showed that Rajah Sahib and what was left of his 
 army had found the work too much highly seasoned 
 for their taste ; that they had just run away, leaving 
 all their guns, ammunition, and stores to be picked 
 up by the victors at their leisure. 
 
 Such was the forever memorable defence of 
 Arcot, and such too was the practical foundation of 
 the British Empire in India. It was the work of 
 a hundred and twenty-five English soldiers and two 
 hundred Sepoys, inspired to heroism by a young 
 man whom Fortune had suddenly plucked out of 
 the wrong place and set down in the right one. 
 
 Clive was by no means the man to look upon 
 work as done because it was well begun. The 
 authorities at Fort St. George promptly sent him 
 two hundred more English soldiers and seven 
 hundred Sepoys, and with this force which was 
 quite a large army for him he marched out to join 
 hands with Morari Row, attacked Rajah Sahib -at 
 the head of five thousand men with a stiffening of 
 three hundred French regulars, hit him very hard, 
 and generally convinced people that an Englishman 
 worthy of his name and race had at length taken 
 matters in hand. 
 
 Unhappily, however, the English were not as 
 strong in the council-chamber as they were in the 
 field, and while the authorities were hesitating, 
 Rajah Sahib and Dupleix retrieved their loss to 
 such purpose that a native army supported by four 
 hundred French troops marched almost up to the
 
 160 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 walls of Fort St. George and proceeded to amuse 
 themselves by laying the settlement waste, with the 
 result that Captain Clive had to come to the rescue, 
 and the end was another overwhelming defeat, 
 during which about half of the French regulars 
 were either killed or taken prisoners. 
 
 This physical victory was followed by a moral 
 one no less effective. The vaingloriously-named 
 City of the Victory of Dupleix, surmounted by its 
 magniloquently inscribed pillar, lay at Clive's mercy 
 and directly in his path, and he promptly pulled the 
 pillar down and wiped the city off the face of the 
 earth. He didn't do this because he personally 
 disliked either Dupleix or his nation, but in doing it 
 he showed that he was statesman as well as soldier, 
 for, as he well knew, the destruction of the City of 
 Victory was to the waiting and watching millions 
 of India the symbol of the destruction and discredit 
 of the French power, and the establishment and 
 vindication of the British. From that day to this 
 Britain's star in the East has been in the ascendant 
 and that of France on the decline. 
 
 How completely all this and what followed was 
 the work of one man, and one only is eloquently 
 shown by the pronouncement of old Morari Row 
 to the effect that the English who followed Clive 
 must be of quite a different tribe or breed to those 
 who followed anybody else, and further by the fact 
 that he inflicted two decisive defeats upon the 
 French at Covelong and Chingleput, with a force
 
 LORD CLIVE 161 
 
 consisting of five hundred raw Sepoy levies, and 
 two hundred newly-imported scourings of the 
 London slums, who had so little of the soldier in 
 them that when a shot killed one in the first skirmish 
 all the rest turned round and ran away ; while 
 on another occasion the report of a cannon so 
 frightened the sentries that they all left their 
 posts, and one of them was discovered occupying 
 a strategic position at the bottom of a well ! 
 
 And yet Clive, somehow, made steady, disciplined 
 soldiers out of this miserable rabble, and, though 
 at last he was so ill that he could hardly stand, 
 led them to victory and turned the French out of 
 their forts which was perhaps a miracle even 
 greater than the making of Cromwell's Ironsides. 
 
 After this the young man, having well earned 
 a holiday, got married and came home for his 
 honeymoon. He was at once hailed as the saviour 
 of India or at any rate of the East India Com- 
 pany, the directors of which drained many a good 
 bottle of port to the toast of " General " Clive ; and 
 even his father half increduously admitted that 
 " after all it seemed that the booby had something 
 in him." 
 
 But "the booby," who had come back moderately 
 rich, bore no malice, and at once began to repair 
 the evil of his youth by paying off all the debts of 
 his family. He then proceeded to waste his 
 substance and his time by getting into Parliament 
 and getting turned out again on petition, after 
 
 12
 
 162 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 which he very properly went back to India to do 
 work that parliamentary orators couldn't do. 
 
 His first exploit was the reduction of the pirate 
 stronghold of Gheriah, which had long dominated 
 the whole Arabian Gulf, the next was the avenging 
 of one of the blackest crimes in history. There is 
 no need to tell of it here, for is not the story 
 of the Black Hole of Calcutta deep-graven in the 
 memory of every man and woman, boy and girl, 
 of Anglo-Saxon blood? Forty- eight hours after 
 the news reached Madras Clive was given the 
 command of nine hundred British infantry and 
 fifteen hundred Sepoys, and with this army, sup- 
 ported by a fleet under Admiral Watson, he. 
 marched to the conquest of an empire half as large 
 as Europe. 
 
 Curiously enough, however, he began by treating 
 with Surajah Dowlah the arch-criminal of the 
 Black Hole instead of crushing him, and, more 
 amazing still, during the course of the negotiations, 
 he deliberately forged Admiral Watson's name to 
 a treaty intended to deceive an adherent whom he 
 knew to have made terms with the other side. It 
 is the most inexplicable act in his career, and, being 
 so, it is only a waste of words to try and explain 
 it away. He did it, and there's an end of it. 
 
 The next act in the now swiftly passing drama 
 was the first and only council of war that Clive ever 
 held. It was the eve of Plassey, an occasion ever 
 memorable in the annals, not only of Britain but of
 
 LORD CLIVE 163 
 
 the whole Orient. He was on one bank of the 
 river, Surajah Dowlah was on the other with an 
 army outnumbering his by twenty to one, splendidly 
 equipped, very strong in artillery, and, as usual, 
 supported and officered by the inevitable French- 
 men. The river was the Rubicon which lay 
 between Clive and the Empire of India and for 
 once in his life he hesitated. 
 
 He called a council of war. It decided against 
 crossing the river with three thousand men in face 
 of sixty thousand, and Clive endorsed the verdict. 
 Then he went apart under some palm trees and 
 held another and a wiser council with himself, and 
 ' this council promptly and utterly revoked the 
 decision of the other. 
 
 The next morning the river was crossed and the 
 next night the little army encamped within a mile 
 of the Nabob's host. At sunrise the next day 
 Surajah Dowlah, who in the midst of his myriads 
 had passed a night haunted, as has been suggested, 
 by the ghosts of the men and women who perished 
 in the Black Hole, sent forth his forty thousand 
 infantry, his fifteen thousand cavalry, his batteries 
 of fifty guns, and his iron-plated war-elephants to 
 crush the invader once and for all, and on they 
 went like some huge tidal wave, roaring and 
 rushing, to overwhelm some little tree-clad island 
 and then, just as the human avalanche was in mid- 
 career, the despot weakling's will wavered, or, more 
 probably, his mind broke down, and he gave the
 
 1 64 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 order to halt and retreat, almost before a blow was 
 struck. 
 
 It was the moment of grace for Clive and he 
 seized it. The three thousand charged the sixty 
 thousand, and all of a sudden the impending 
 tragedy on which the fate of all India from the 
 Himalayas to Cape Comorin depended, was turned 
 into a farce. Of the sixty thousand only five 
 hundred were slain ; of the three thousand twenty- 
 two were killed and fifty wounded. The whole 
 thing was over in an hour, and India was 
 won. 
 
 To Clive himself the result was an appointment 
 as Governor- General over the whole of the 
 Company's territory in Bengal, and this virtually 
 raised him to an authority higher than that of 
 a throne, and, to his everlasting honour be it said, 
 that in an age and country of almost universal 
 corruption, he never abused it. Victory after 
 victory in the field, and triumph after triumph in 
 policy now followed fast upon each other, till 
 French, Dutch, and native princes alike were 
 crushed to impotence or reduced to grovelling 
 submission, and the crowning victory of Chinsurah 
 set the seal of absolute supremacy upon British rule 
 in India. 
 
 Three months after this Clive again came home, 
 the possessor of fairly won wealth which was only 
 exceeded by the magnitude of his fame, to be hailed 
 as the greatest of British living Commanders, and
 
 LORD CLIVE 165 
 
 to be rewarded, first with a place in the Irish, and 
 then with one in the British Peerage. 
 
 The story of his five years' stay in England is not 
 an edifying one. It is a story of wild extravagance, 
 fierce and unworthy jealousies in the very councils 
 of that Company to which he had given more lands 
 and subjects than any European monarch possessed, 
 and of general dissatisfaction and disillusion. 
 
 But meanwhile the way to his last and perhaps 
 his greatest triumph was being prepared for him. 
 As year after year passed it became more and more 
 plain that the empire he had created could not get 
 on without him. The men put in authority after 
 him by the Company had but one object in life and 
 that was to " shake the Pagoda Tree." In other 
 words, to set prince against prince and state against 
 state for the sole purpose of making money out of 
 their differences, and generally to squeeze the utmost 
 amount of gold out of the country in the shortest 
 possible time. 
 
 Corruption which scandalised even that corrupt 
 age revelled in hitherto unheard - of excesses. 
 Everything was neglected but money - making, 
 and the lately-terrible English name was fast 
 becoming a scoff and a by-word even to the 
 plundered and the oppressed. So in the end 
 Clive went out again, it being seen that he only 
 could end a situation fast becoming impossible. 
 
 But this time it was not to fight French, or 
 Indian, or Dutchman, but his own countrymen, and
 
 166 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 to win in the Council Chamber a victory that was 
 perhaps greater than any he had won on the battle- 
 field. In eighteen months he did what he had said 
 he would do, and replaced chaos with cosmos. It 
 was a fitting climax to his life's work, and yet such 
 is the irony of Fate and the baseness of human 
 nature that it also came near to proving his personal 
 ruin. 
 
 He had fought and conquered the evil spirits of 
 greed, corruption, and private extortion, but he had 
 not killed them. The hatred of the evil-doer pur- 
 sued him across the seas and roused up all the old 
 jealousies at home. On his first and second returns 
 he had been hailed, first as a man of the most 
 brilliant promise and then as a man who had 
 splendidly fulfilled that promise. But now, in the 
 country which he had enriched by the addition of a 
 whole empire no charge was so base that it was 
 not believed against him. He had put down the 
 oppressor, the extortioner, and the money-grubber, 
 and he came back to his native land to be arraigned 
 before a committee of the House of Commons as all 
 these and something of a criminal to boot ! 
 
 But with this third home-coming of his, his story 
 as an Empire-Maker ends. It is well to know that he 
 came triumphantly out of all the toils that his jealous 
 and unworthy enemies had laid for him, and in this 
 he was happier than his great rival Dupleix, who 
 sank through all the gradations of poverty and 
 misery into a nameless grave. But still the work
 
 LORD CLIVE 167 
 
 of his foes and that of the terrible Indian climate 
 had not been without effect. Crippled both in mind 
 and body, he at last sought refuge in opium from 
 the tortures of the diseases which he had contracted 
 in the service of his country. 
 
 Time after time his genius blazed out again 
 through the glooms that were settling over his later 
 days, and so great was the faith of the Govern- 
 ment in him that he was actually asked to go 
 and do for North America what he had done for 
 India. 
 
 If the broken invalid of those days had been the 
 same man as the defender of Arcot and the victor of 
 Plassey, the history of the Anglo-Saxon race might 
 well have been changed, for Robert Clive would 
 not only have been strong to crush the rebels, but 
 also just and generous to procure them afterwards 
 those equal rights of citizenship the denial of 
 which split Anglo-Saxondom in two. 
 
 Of this, at least, we may be fairly certain : there 
 would have been no Bunker's Hill and no Brandy- 
 wine River save as geographical expressions, and 
 there would have been neither a Saratoga nor a 
 Yorktown save as towns and nothing more. 
 
 But this was not to be. Clive's genius had given 
 forth its last flash and the eclipse had come. 
 On November 22, 1774, some ten weeks after the 
 assembly of the Revolutionary Congress at Phila- 
 delphia, Robert, Lord Clive, Baron of Plassey, and 
 Conqueror of the domains of the great Tamerlane,
 
 1 68 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 for the third time put a pistol to his head and this 
 time it went off. 
 
 It was, as Macaulay says, an awful close to such 
 a career, and yet, after all, granted even everything 
 that his worst enemies said against him, Robert 
 Clive had well and worthily earned a place in the 
 front rank of Britain's Empire-Makers. 
 
 On Sir Thomas Wren's tomb in St. Paul's stands 
 the Latin legend which translated reads : " If you 
 seek his monument look around you ! " If a man 
 could be endowed with an infinite range of vision 
 he might be placed on the highest pinnacle of the 
 Himalayas, and as he looked east and west and 
 south the same might be said to him as the epitaph 
 of Robert Clive ; for all that he could see from the 
 Arabian Gulf to the Bay of Bengal, and from the 
 Himalayan slopes to the coral reefs of Cape Comorin, 
 would be the monument of his eternal fame and is 
 there man born of woman who could desire a 
 worthier ?
 
 VIII 
 WARREN HASTINGS, 
 
 THE FIRST UNCROWNED KING OF INDIA
 
 VIII 
 WARREN HASTINGS 
 
 BOTH in point of time and personal capacity, 
 Warren Hastings, first Governor-General 
 of the- British Empire in India, was the successor 
 of Robert, Lord Clive. At the same time it may 
 be as well to point out in this connection that there 
 might be more literal correctness in describing 
 Warren Hastings as an Empire-Preserver rather 
 than an Empire- Maker. 
 
 It was the victor of Plassey who rough-hewed 
 the stones upon which the now gorgeous fabric 
 of our Indian Empire stands. It was Hastings 
 who, in spite of stupendous difficulties, took 
 those stones and laid them down according to 
 that plan which he had formed, and which has 
 been followed in the main by all who have added 
 to the structure. 
 
 As was said in other words of William of Orange, 
 one of the greatest claims that the great Governor 
 has to the interest and admiration of those who 
 have a share in the splendid inheritance that he 
 
 171
 
 i;2 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 built up, lies in the fact that he did his work in the 
 face of everlasting hindrances and in the midst 
 of perpetual embarrassments, which must infallibly 
 have discouraged and bewildered any but a man 
 upon whom the gods had set the stamp of greatness, 
 and, in their own way, crowned him one of the 
 kings of men. In short, like the grandson of 
 William the Silent, Warren Hastings was first and 
 foremost an overcomer of difficulties. 
 
 Great and splendid and enduring as his work 
 undoubtedly was, it would not, after all, have been 
 very difficult to do if he had just been left to do it 
 not helped, because he wasn't the kind of man 
 who wanted help, but just left alone. Instead of 
 this, however, as though it were not enough that 
 his work of organising and consolidating what the 
 sword of Clive had won, and combating the infinity 
 of complications arising out of the rivalry of a 
 dozen warring native potentates, he was purposely 
 surrounded in his own council-chamber by un- 
 scrupulous enemies of his own blood and country, 
 whose only title to historical recognition is now the 
 infamy that they have earned by failing to prevent 
 the doing of that work which Warren Hastings 
 saw had got to be done, and which he, with an 
 inflexible heroism, decided to do in spite of every- 
 thing that his enemies, white or brown, Moham- 
 medan, Hindoo or British, could do to cripple 
 him. 
 
 Sir Alfred Lyall, his most recent biographer, has
 
 WARREN HASTINGS 173 
 
 very happily said of him that "perhaps no man of 
 undisputed genius ever inherited less in mind or 
 money from his parents or owed them fewer 
 obligations of any kind." His father, Pynaston 
 Hastings, was the vagrant ne'er-do-weel son of 
 a fine old family. He married when only fifteen 
 without any means or prospect of supporting a 
 family. Warren was the second son. His father 
 was only seventeen at his birth, and his mother 
 died a few days later. As soon as he was old 
 enough Pynaston took holy orders, married again, 
 obtained a living in the West Indies, and there 
 died, leaving his son to be put into a charity school 
 by his grandfather. 
 
 This is not much for a father to do for a son, but 
 there was something else that Pynaston Hastings 
 did which was of very great consequence, though 
 in the nature of the case no credit is due to him for 
 it. He transmitted to him the blood of a long line 
 of ancestors, which stretched away back through 
 one of the followers of William the Norman to the 
 days of those old pirate kings of the Northland 
 who, as I have pointed out before, were none the 
 worse fathers of Empire- Makers because they were 
 pirates as well. 
 
 One of his ancestors, John Hastings, Lord of 
 the Manors of Yelford- Hastings in Oxfordshire, 
 and of Dalesford in Worcestershire, lost about half 
 of his worldly goods, including the plate that he 
 sent to be coined at the Oxford Mint, in helping
 
 174 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 Charles Stuart to fight the great Oliver, and after- 
 wards spent most of the remainder in buying his 
 peace from the Parliament. It was on the ancient 
 estate of Dalesford, long before sold to the stranger 
 and the alien, that Warren Hastings was born, 
 some two hundred years later, practically a pauper 
 and almost an outcast, under the shadow of his 
 ancestral home. 
 
 When he came to reasoning years he made a 
 boyish resolve, challenging fate with all the splendid 
 insolence of a seven-year-old dreamer, that some 
 day he would make his fortune and buy the old 
 place back which in due course he did, although 
 in those days his prospect of doing so was about as 
 small as it was of reigning over the millions of 
 subjects whose descendants to-day revere his 
 memory almost as that of one of their own 
 demigods. 
 
 When he was twelve years old Warren was 
 taken away from the charity school by one of his 
 uncles and sent to Westminster, where he distin- 
 guished himself by winning a King's scholarship in 
 the year 1747. Even when his poor old grand- 
 father, the last Hastings of Dalesford, and the 
 miserably paid rector of the parish which his 
 ancestors had owned, sent Warren to sit beside the 
 little rustics of the village school, he immediately 
 singled himself out from them by the willing in- 
 telligence with which he took to his work and 
 afterwards the headmaster of Westminster had
 
 WARREN HASTINGS 175 
 
 high hopes of university distinctions for him. It 
 was indeed a somewhat curious coincidence that 
 Robert Clive should have been such an exceedingly 
 bad boy and the completer of his work such a 
 good one. 
 
 But the Fates had already decided that Warren 
 Hastings was to graduate with honours in a very 
 much bigger university than that on the banks of 
 the I sis or the Cam. His uncle died suddenly, and 
 the orphan lad was passed on to the care of a 
 distant connection who happened to be a director of 
 the East India Company 
 
 His headmaster remonstrated strongly, but happily 
 without effect, against his immediate removal to 
 Christ's Hospital to learn account-keeping before 
 going out to Bengal as a writer in the service of 
 " John Company." 
 
 It seems as though the worthy Dr. Nichols had 
 a very high opinion of his intellectual abilities, for, 
 when all his protests failed, he actually offered to 
 send his brilliant young pupil to Oxford at his own 
 expense. 
 
 Happily for the British Empire Mr. Director 
 Chiswick, the relative aforesaid, stuck to his selfish 
 project of getting him off his hands as quickly and 
 permanently as possible by sending him out to 
 Calcutta to take jungle fever or make a fortune, just 
 in the same way that Clive's despairing parents 
 had done. 
 
 He sailed for Calcutta when he was seventeen,
 
 1 76 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 the same age as his precious father was when he 
 was born. He had been two years at the desk in 
 Calcutta when there came the news that Clive had 
 taken Arcot and put a very different complexion on 
 the struggle between the English and French 
 Companies for the supremacy of India. 
 
 About that time he was sent to a little town on 
 the Hooghly about a mile from Moorshedabad, and 
 while he was here driving bargains with native 
 silk-weavers and tea merchants, Surajah Dowlah 
 marched into Calcutta and cast such English 
 prisoners as he could lay hold of into the Black 
 Hole. 
 
 Hastings was also taken prisoner, but most 
 fortunately did not get into the Black Hole, and 
 he appears to have been set at large on the inter- 
 cession of the chief of the Dutch factory. During 
 the period which followed his partial release for he 
 was still under surveillance at Moorshedabad he 
 made his first essay in diplomacy, or what would 
 perhaps be more correctly described as political 
 intrigue, with the result that the city got too hot for 
 him, and he fled to Fulda, an island below Calcutta, 
 where, as has been pithily said, the English fugitives 
 from Fort William "were encamped like a ship- 
 wrecked crew awaiting rescue." 
 
 The rescue came in the shape of the combined 
 naval and military expedition, commanded by 
 Admiral Watson and Robert Clive, which was 
 destined to end in the triumph of Plassey, and
 
 WARREN HASTINGS 177 
 
 Warren Hastings, as Macaulay aptly suggests in 
 his brilliant but singularly misinformed essay, 
 doubtless inspired by the example of Clive and 
 the similarity of their entrance on to the stage of 
 Indian affairs, like him exchanged the pen for the 
 sword, and fought through the campaign. But 
 Clive saw " that there was more in his head than 
 his arm," and after the battle of Plassey he sent him 
 as resident Agent of the Company to the Court of 
 Meer Jaffier, the puppet-nabob who had been set 
 up ia the place of Surajah Dowlah. 
 
 He held this post until he was made a Member 
 of Council in 1761, and was obliged to remove to 
 Calcutta. Clive was at home now, and the inter- 
 regnum of oppression, extortion, and general mis- 
 management was in full swing ; but the man who 
 was afterwards so grossly wronged and falsely 
 impeached, and who passed through the most cele- 
 brated trial in English history charged with just 
 such crimes, had so little taste for them that three 
 years later he came back a comparatively poor man, 
 and the fortune he had he either gave away to his 
 relations or lost through the failure of a Dutch 
 trading-house. 
 
 After a stay of four years, during which he 
 renewed his intimacy with his old schoolfellow, 
 the creator of the immortal John Gilpin, and made 
 the acquaintance of Johnson and Boswell, he found 
 himself so reduced in circumstances that he not 
 only had to ask the Directors of the Company to 
 
 '3
 
 i/8 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 give him more employment in India, but when he 
 got it he was forced to borrow the money to pay his 
 passage out again. 
 
 It is quite impossible to form any just and reason- 
 able judgment of the work which Warren Hastings 
 now went out to do unless one first gets an adequate 
 idea of the condition of things obtaining in India 
 before the English went there, and of the condi- 
 tions that would have obtained, if men like Clive, 
 Hastings, Cornwallis, and Wellesley had not by one 
 means and another some good, some bad, but all 
 just what were possible under the circumstances- 
 succeeded in imposing the Pax Britannica upon 
 the rival and constantly warring potentates who 
 governed the native populations. 
 
 No doubt the war on the Rohillas, or the so- 
 called spoliation of the Begums of Oude, together 
 with more or less magnified incidentals, formed 
 famous themes in after years for the inflated 
 eloquence and grandiloquent over-statements of 
 Edmund Burke and Sheridan, and for the far 
 less comprehensible or excusable special pleading 
 of Lord Macaulay. 
 
 It was, no doubt, very affecting to see the 
 patched and powdered fine ladies who paid their 
 fifty guineas a seat in Westminster Hall to watch 
 the men of words mangling the reputation of the 
 man of deeds, weeping and fainting at the harrow- 
 ing pictures they drew mostly on their own 
 imaginations of the sufferings which he had not
 
 WARREN HASTINGS 179 
 
 caused ; but we of to-day are sufficiently far re- 
 moved from the personal spite and the passion and 
 rivalry which inspired the enemies and accusers of 
 the great Governor to be able to look at things as 
 they actually were, and in doing so we shall see 
 that, however heavy was the hand that Warren 
 Hastings laid upon the subject peoples, it was but 
 as a caress to a blow when compared with the 
 oppression and extortion with which conqueror 
 after conqueror, Mohammedan and Hindoo, Sikh, 
 Afghan, and Mahratta, had ground down and 
 despoiled the helpless races which successively 
 passed under their sway. 
 
 Order, however dearly bought, is always less 
 expensive than anarchy, and the impassioned 
 periods of Burke and Sheridan look somewhat 
 silly when we compare them with the sober facts. 
 It never seems to have struck them or their 
 audience to make any comparison between the 
 English gentleman and loyal servant of his country 
 whom they would have handed down to history as 
 a monster of iniquity, and those real tyrants of the 
 type of Surajah Dowlah, Hyder-Ali, and Nana- 
 Sahib, whose brutal rule and ruthless wars of 
 conquest and extermination must have been, under 
 the circumstances, the only possible alternative to 
 the strong and steady control of the English- 
 man. 
 
 The first thing that Warren Hastings did on his 
 return was to reorganise the trade of the Province,
 
 i8o MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 and in this he succeeded so well that the Directors 
 rewarded him in 1772 with the Governorship of 
 Bengal ; and if they could have stopped there, 
 leaving him to do the rest, the immediately sub- 
 sequent history of India might have been very 
 much more creditable to the rulers and more 
 pleasant reading for the descendants of the ruled 
 than it was. But unhappily a body of traders and 
 shareholders became possessed with the idea that 
 they were the proper sort of people to rule a 
 country divided by political and religious factions, 
 with a history of almost constant warfare stretching 
 back for centuries, and situated fifteen thousand 
 miles away. 
 
 This, on the face of it, was an impossibility. 
 When they had found their Governor they should 
 have trusted him to govern, instead of sending out 
 his personal enemies to sit at his council-table to 
 spy upon his actions and hamper and oppose him in 
 everything that he did. 
 
 But there was something else in its way quite as 
 serious as this. Practically all the charges that 
 were brought against Warren Hastings on his im- 
 peachment are answered and disposed of by the fact 
 that the only condition upon which he could retain 
 his position and do the work that he had set his 
 soul upon doing was, in three words, making India 
 pay. John Company looked upon his new posses- 
 sion as a trader on a market. With the Directors, 
 who, after all were Hastings' masters, it was busi-
 
 WARREN HASTINGS 181 
 
 ness first, and policy and government a good dis- 
 tance after. 
 
 Even Macaulay admits that every exhortation to 
 govern leniently and respect the rights of the native 
 princes and their subjects was accompanied by a 
 demand for increased contributions. " The incon- 
 sistency was at once manifest to their vice-regent at 
 Calcutta, who, with an empty treasury, with an un- 
 paid army, with his own salary often in arrear, with 
 deficient crops, with Government tenants daily 
 running away, was called upon to remit home 
 another half-million without fail." 
 
 There is another thing to be remembered before 
 we can judge Warren Hastings fairly in the matter 
 of his forced contributions. The tea that was flung 
 overboard in Boston Harbour in the December of 
 1773 was imported by the East India Company. 
 The connection will appear more obvious when we 
 look at what followed. 
 
 Great Britain was about to plunge into war, east 
 and west, north and south. Criminal misgovern- 
 ment at home had produced revolt abroad. Dis- 
 aster after disaster and disgrace after disgrace were 
 soon to befall the British arms. The Anglo-Saxon 
 race was about to be split in two, and England her- 
 self was to fight, if not for her very existence, 
 at least for her honourable place among the 
 nations. 
 
 All this Warren Hastings foresaw with that 
 marvellous prevision which made some of his
 
 182 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 actions look almost prophetic, and determined that, 
 come what might elsewhere, the Star of the East 
 should not be plucked from the British Crown. He 
 was not a soldier. He was an administrator. His 
 task was not to increase but to hold. He was by no 
 means always successful in war, and in all his long 
 rule he never added a province or a district to the 
 area of British India ; but what Clive won he held 
 and strengthened during those fateful years when 
 the destiny of Britain as an empire was trembling 
 in the balances of Fate. 
 
 Now, to keep India, money was absolutely 
 necessary, and the getting of it was not always 
 work that could be done with kid gloves on, and 
 the greatness of Warren Hastings as Empire- 
 Maker or Holder may be seen in the fact that he 
 deliberately, and with his eyes open, risked his 
 future fortune and reputation in the doing of this 
 work by the only means available. 
 
 He knew that his methods would be censured by 
 his masters and made unscrupulous use of by his 
 enemies, and he said so in so many words, and, 
 careless of criticism and undeterred by the most 
 virulent and treasonable opposition, he succeeded 
 so far that he was able to say with truth that he 
 had rescued one province from infamy, and two 
 from total ruin. It is simply amazing to the dis- 
 passionate reader of the present day to watch the 
 needless struggles which were imposed upon this 
 man/ already confronted by a titanic task, by the
 
 WARREN HASTINGS 183 
 
 very men who ought to have been the first, for 
 their own sakes and their country's, to have made 
 his way as smooth and his burdens as light as 
 possible. 
 
 The man who may be fairly described as the evil 
 genius of Warren Hastings' career was that Sir 
 Philip Francis who is generally looked upon as the 
 author of the far-famed Letters of Junius. He and 
 Sir John Clavering, both personal enemies of the 
 Governor-General as he was now were sent out 
 as members of the Council, and to the days of their 
 death they never ceased to thwart and embarrass 
 him by every means in their power. 
 
 One reason for their enmity was undoubtedly the 
 sordid motive of getting him turned out of the 
 Governor - Generalship in order that one of them 
 might succeed to his office, and that both might 
 share in the fruits of the extortions which, in him, 
 they condemned. 
 
 This was not only unjust to Hastings, but it was 
 also a crime against their country, committed at 
 a moment when she had all too much need of such 
 men as he was. 
 
 To my mind, at least, there is a very strong 
 resemblance between the savage invective of Junius 
 and the consistent and unscrupulous malevolence 
 with which Sir Philip Francis tried to wreck the 
 life-work of a man at whose table he was not 
 worthy to sit. 
 
 Those were days in which political rivalry and
 
 1 84 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 personal enmity entailed personal consequences if 
 they were pushed too far. Hastings seemed to 
 have come at length to the conclusion that India 
 was not large enough to hold himself and Francis. 
 He had submitted to insult after insult, and he 
 would have been something more than human if his 
 enemy's unceasing .efforts to make his life a misery 
 and his work a failure had not left some bitterness 
 in his soul, and so one fine day he sat down and 
 embodied his opinion of him in a Minute to the 
 Council, and in this he purposely put words which 
 meant inevitable bloodshed : 
 
 " I do not trust to his promise of candour; 
 convinced that he is incapable of it, and that his 
 sole purpose and wish are to embarrass and defeat 
 every measure which I may undertake or which 
 may tend even to promote the public interest if my 
 credit is connected with them. . . . Every dis- 
 appointment and misfortune have been aggravated 
 by him, and every fabricated tale of armies devoted 
 to famine and massacre have found their first and 
 most ready way to his office, where it is known they 
 would meet with most welcome reception. ... I 
 judge of his public conduct by my experience of his 
 private, which I have found void of truth and 
 honour. This is a severe charge but temperately 
 and deliberately made." 
 
 These were not words which a man in those days 
 could write without taking his chance of a bullet 
 or the point of a small-sword, and Hastings knew
 
 HIS ENEMY WENT DOWN WITH A BULLET IN THE RIGHT SIDE. 
 (I'a& 185.)
 
 WARREN HASTINGS 185 
 
 this perfectly well. Francis challenged him on the 
 spot, and the day but one after they confronted 
 each other with pistols at fourteen paces. Francis's 
 pistol missed fire, and Hastings obligingly waited 
 until he had reprimed. The second time the pistol 
 went off, but the ball flew wide. Hastings returned 
 it very deliberately and his enemy went down with 
 a bullet in the right side. 
 
 The difference between the two men may be seen 
 from what followed. After his adversary had been 
 carried home, the Governor-General sent him a 
 friendly message offering to visit him and bury the 
 hatchet for good, as was customary in such affairs 
 between gentlemen. Francis, not being a gentle- 
 man, refused, and as soon as he was well enough 
 to travel he came home to England to injure by 
 backstairs-intrigue and the most unscrupulous lying 
 and misrepresentation the man who, in the midst 
 of his difficulties and dangers, had proved all too 
 strong for him in the open. 
 
 To use his own words, "after a service of thirty- 
 five years from its commencement, and almost 
 thirteen of them passed in the charge and exercise 
 of the first nominal office of the government," 
 Warren Hastings at last laid down his thankless 
 task and came home to render an account of his 
 stewardship before a tribunal which possessed 
 neither adequate knowledge to judge of his actions 
 nor that judicial spirit of calmness and impartiality 
 which could alone have guaranteed him such a
 
 1 86 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 trial as English justice accords to the vilest 
 criminal. 
 
 His impeachment is not only the most notable 
 but altogether the most amazing trial in the history 
 of British Law. It would be alike superfluous and 
 presumptuous to reproduce here an account of that 
 which has been described in the incomparable 
 sentences of Lord Macaulay. His essay on Warren 
 Hastings has been considered by many to be the 
 finest of that magnificent collection of Essays and 
 Reviews, and the story of the Impeachment is 
 undoubtedly the finest portion of it. Hence those 
 who read these lines cannot do better than read 
 it as well. If they have read it before they will 
 simply be repeating a pleasure ; if they have not, 
 then a new pleasure awaits them. 
 
 What we are concerned with here are the bare 
 facts of the matter ; but we may first pause for 
 a moment to look at the man as he was when 
 he came across the world to face his mostly 
 incompetent and prejudiced judges. This is how 
 his picture is drawn by Wraxall, a contemporary 
 and a personal acquaintance. The portrait is 
 certainly more faithful than the ridiculous caricatures 
 drawn by Burke and Sheridan. 
 
 "When he landed in his native country he had 
 attained his fifty-second year. In his person he 
 was thin, but not tall, of a spare habit, very bald, 
 with a countenance placidly thoughtful, but when 
 animated full of intelligence. Placed in a situation
 
 WARREN HASTINGS 187 
 
 where he might have amassed immense wealth 
 without exciting censure, he revisited England with 
 only a modest competence. In private life he was 
 playful and gay to a degree hardly conceivable ; 
 never carrying his political vexations into the 
 bosom of his family. Of a temper so buoyant and 
 elastic that the instant he quitted the council-board 
 where he had been assailed by every species of 
 opposition, often heightened by personal acrimony, 
 he mixed in society like a youth upon whom care 
 had never intruded." 
 
 Such was the man who, in a period of national 
 dejection which almost amounted to disgrace, came 
 back, the one man of his generation who had 
 upheld the honour of the British name abroad in 
 a post of great difficulty and danger, to receive, not 
 reward, but impeachment. 
 
 He first faced his judges on February 13, 1788, 
 " looking very infirm and much indisposed, and 
 dressed in a plain, poppy-coloured suit of clothes." 
 He was finally acquitted on March i, 1794! The 
 trial thus languished through seven sessions of 
 Parliament, the total hearing occupied one hundred 
 and eighteen sittings of the Court, and the vindi- 
 cation of his personal and official character from the 
 slanders of enemies, who were at last refuted with 
 complete discredit to his slanderers cost him about 
 ,100,000, of which no less than ,75,000 were 
 actually certified legal costs and this was the 
 reward that England gave to the one man who was
 
 1 88 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 capable of preserving to her the fruit of the victories 
 of Clive and his gallant lieutenants ! 
 
 Modern opinion, endorsed by the high legal 
 authority of the late Sir James Stephen, has com- 
 pletely rejected alike the personal vilifications of 
 such self-interested traitors as Francis and Clavering, 
 and the emotional special-pleading of Burke and 
 Sheridan. 
 
 " The impeachment of Warren Hastings," he 
 says, " is, I think, a blot on the judicial history of 
 the country. It was monstrous that a man should 
 be tortured at irregular intervals for seven years, in 
 order that a singularly incompetent tribunal might 
 be addressed before an excited audience by Burke 
 and Sheridan, in language far removed from the 
 calmness with which an advocate for the prosecution 
 ought to address a criminal court." 
 
 To some extent Hastings was recouped for the 
 cost of his persecution, even if he was not rewarded 
 for his distinguished services. He was granted 
 a pension of ,4,000 a year for twenty-eight and 
 a half years, part paid in advance, and a loan of 
 50,000 free of interest. But meanwhile he had 
 been fulfilling the dream of his boyhood by buying 
 back his ancestral estate for 60,000, and another 
 60,000 was still owing to the lawyers. 
 
 Henceforth, disgusted, as he may well have been, 
 with the ingratitude of the country he had served so 
 well in so difficult a time, he retired to his old home 
 and spent the remaining years of his life in the
 
 WARREN HASTINGS 189 
 
 calm pursuits of a country gentleman, diversified 
 by the cultivation of letters and the writing of 
 verses. 
 
 It was in these days that he used to tell his friends 
 how, as a little lad of seven, he had lain in the long 
 grass on the banks of a stream that flowed through 
 the old domain of Dalesford and dreamt the wild 
 dream whose fulfilment had, after all, been stranger 
 than the dream itself for not even his boyish 
 romance could be compared with the fact that, dur- 
 ing the winning of the means to buy back the home 
 of his fathers, he had risen to be the actual ruler of 
 something like fifty millions of people, and the 
 dictator of terms of peace and war to princes who 
 governed territories half as large as Europe and 
 even more populous. 
 
 But in the end he outlived both his enemies and 
 the discredit they had tried to cast upon him. Two 
 years before the battle of Waterloo he was sum- 
 moned before the Houses of Parliament in the 
 evening of his days to give evidence on the work 
 of his manhood, and when he retired, after nearly 
 four hours' examination, the whole crowded House 
 of Commons rose and stood uncovered and in 
 silence as the old Empire- Keeper walked out of the 
 Chamber. 
 
 He lived to see that empire, for which he had 
 striven so painfully and so manfully, redeemed by 
 the genius and valour of Rodney and Nelson and 
 Wellington from the disgrace and degradation
 
 190 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 which had threatened it during the last decades of 
 the eighteenth century, and three years after 
 Waterloo he died. 
 
 His remains lie in the family church at Dalesford, 
 and, to once more quote the words of Sir Alfred 
 Lyall, " in Westminster Abbey a bust and an 
 inscription commemorate the name and career of a 
 man who, rising early to high place and power, held 
 an office of the greatest importance to his country 
 for thirteen years, by sheer force of character and 
 tenaciousness against adversity, and who spent the 
 next seven years in defending himself before a 
 nation which accepted the benefits but disliked the 
 ways of his too masterly activity." 
 
 Lord Macaulay, who throughout his famous essay 
 does him less than justice, concludes it by making 
 almost generous amends. " Not only had the poor 
 orphan retrieved the fallen fortunes of his line not 
 only had he re-purchased the old lands and rebuilt 
 the old dwelling he had preserved and extended 
 an empire. 1 He had founded a policy. He had 
 administered government and war with more than 
 the capacity of Richelieu. He patronised learning 
 with the judicious liberality of Cosmo. He had 
 been attacked by the most formidable combination 
 of enemies that ever sought the destruction of a 
 
 1 In the territorial sense this is hardly correct. The great 
 essayist probably meant extension in the sense of increase of 
 prestige and influence over the still independent states of the 
 Peninsula.
 
 WARREN HASTINGS 191 
 
 single victim ; and over that combination, after a 
 struggle of ten years, he had triumphed. He had 
 at length gone down to his grave in the fulness of 
 age, in peace after so many troubles, in honour after 
 so much obloquy."
 
 IX 
 
 NELSON 
 
 "ENGLAND EXPECTS THAT EVERY MAN WILL DO HIS 
 
 DUTY:' 
 
 14
 
 IX 
 
 NELSON 
 
 I AM conscious of more difficulties ahead in 
 beginning this sketch tha^n I have felt with 
 regard to any other of the series, for, while on the 
 one hand it would be absurd to omit from the 
 glorious ranks of our Empire-Makers the most 
 glorious of them all, it is at the same time 
 practically impossible to say anything fresh or even 
 anything that is not very generally known about 
 the man who, however much he may once have 
 been slighted, and however inadequately his earlier 
 services may have been rewarded during his life, 
 has now come to be the idol of the country that he 
 saved from invasion and the Empire that he pre- 
 served from destruction. 
 
 His life has been written and re- written, his 
 character and his actions have been discussed and 
 rediscussed, the most private acts and thoughts of 
 his life have been dragged out into the full glare of 
 publicity a fate which any great man would have 
 to be a very great sinner to deserve but when all 
 this has been said and done there remains a
 
 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 single, sharply-defined individuality of this in- 
 comparable naval captain whom the whole world 
 now acknowledges and reveres, quite apart from 
 all national considerations, as the greatest sailor 
 who ever trod a deck and the greatest naval 
 strategist who ever planned a battle or took a 
 fleet into action. 
 
 It has been said that when a nation is on the 
 brink of ruin the Fates either hasten its end or send 
 some great man to restore its fortunes. It certainly 
 was thus with the Britain of Nelson's early youth. 
 On the iyth of October, 1781, Lord Hawke, the 
 victor of Quiberon Bay, and the last of the great 
 line of seamen of whom Admiral Blake was the 
 first, died, leaving, as Horace Walpole said the 
 next day in the House of Commons, his mantle to 
 nobody. 
 
 Apparently, there was no one worthy to wear it. 
 The fortunes of England were indeed at a low ebb. 
 Both her naval and military prestige had very 
 seriously declined. The American colonies had 
 been lost by the worst of statesmanship at home 
 and the worst of bungling incompetence and 
 cowardice abroad. We had been beaten by the 
 raw colonists on land and by the French and Dutch 
 at sea. 
 
 At home the very highest circles of the realm 
 were polluted by such corruption and crippled by 
 such imbecility as would be absolutely incredible to 
 us now. Imagine, for instance, what would be
 
 NELSON 197 
 
 thought to-day of the post of Secretary of State 
 for War being given to a man who had been expli- 
 citly declared by a court martial to be absolutely 
 incapable of serving his country in any military 
 capacity ! and yet this is only one example out of 
 many of the flagrant abuses of this amazingly dis- 
 graceful period. 
 
 Happily, however, for the honour of the race and 
 the safety of the Empire there had been born, 
 twenty-three years before to a country parson in 
 Norfolk, a boy, the fifth in a family of eleven, who 
 fourteen years later was destined to die in the 
 moment of victory, happy in the knowledge that he 
 had not left his country a single enemy to fight 
 throughout the length and breadth of the High 
 Seas. When Horace Walpole spoke his panegyric 
 on Lord Hawke he would probably have been very 
 much surprised if he had been told that it was this 
 then insignificant and unknown cousin of his own 
 who was not only to take up the mantle of the hero 
 of Quiberon, but to bequeath it in his turn, not to a 
 rival or a successor, but to the country which his 
 last triumph left mistress of the seas. 
 
 Although there doesn't seem to be any direct 
 proof, it may be admitted that there is sufficiently 
 strong presumption to warrant us in believing, if 
 we choose to do so, that Horatio Nelson, son of the 
 Rev. Edmund Nelson, Rector of Burnham Thorpe 
 in Norfolk, could one way or another have traced 
 a lineage back to the old Sea Kings of the North.
 
 198 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 Certainly he must have had some of the blood of 
 those who fought the Armada in his veins, and it 
 is noteworthy that a Danish poet in celebrating his 
 valour, wisdom, and clemency during and after the 
 great battle of Copenhagen, attempted to soothe 
 the wounded pride of his countrymen by pointing 
 out that Nelson was indubitably a Danish name and 
 that after all they had only been beaten by the 
 descendant of one of their old Sea Kings. 
 
 But however this may be, the immediate facts all 
 show that the man who crowned and completed the 
 work which Francis Drake and his brother pirates 
 began came of a stock that seemed to promise but 
 little in the way of hereditary battle-winning. 
 . Every one on his father's side appears either to 
 have been a parson or to have married one. His 
 mother's father was a parson too, but happily she 
 had a brother Maurice who was a captain in the 
 Navy, and had done some very good work at a time 
 when good work was badly wanted. 
 
 This gallant sailor was a great grand-nephew of 
 Sir John Suckling, the poet, and it may be noticed, 
 in passing, that on the 2ist of October, 1757, the 
 day which we now know as the anniversary of 
 Trafalgar Captain Maurice Suckling in the Dread- 
 nought, in company with two other sixty-gun ships, 
 attacked seven large French men-of-war off Cape 
 Frangois in the West Indies, and gave them such a 
 hammering that they were very thankful for the 
 wind which enabled them to escape.
 
 NELSON 199 
 
 But still more noteworthy is the opinion of 
 Captain Maurice Suckling of his nephew when he 
 first received his father's request to give him a 
 place on board his ship. 
 
 " What," he wrote in reply to the application, 
 " has poor Horatio done, who is so weak, that he 
 above all the rest should be sent to rough it out at 
 sea ? But let him come, and the first time we go 
 into action a cannon-ball may knock off his head 
 and provide for him at once." 
 
 The weakness here somewhat grimly alluded to 
 was the curse of Nelson's existence from the day 
 that he first set foot on the deck of a ship to the 
 moment when the bullet from the mizen-top of the 
 Redoubtable made his almost constant bodily suffer- 
 ing a matter of minutes. 
 
 His physical infirmities, or at any rate the weak- 
 ness of his body as compared with the vast strength 
 and tireless energy of his mind, bring him into very 
 close relationship with William of Orange. Putting 
 nationality aside, he was, in fact, on the sea what 
 William was on land, and the central point in his 
 policy was also the same tireless and unsparing 
 hostility to France. 
 
 With Nelson, indeed, this appears to have gone 
 very near to the borders of fanaticism. Some of 
 his sayings with regard to the Frenchmen of his 
 day are absolutely ferocious. Hatred and contempt 
 are about equally blended in them. " Hate a 
 Frenchman as you would hate the devil ! ' was
 
 200 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 with him an axiom and was his usual form of 
 advice to midshipmen on entering the service. 
 
 On one occasion in the Mediterranean he said to 
 one of his captains who had got into a dispute 
 about the property which the defeated French 
 garrison at Gaieta were to be allowed to take 
 away with them : 
 
 " I am sorry that you had any altercation with 
 them. There is no way to deal with a Frenchman 
 but to knock him down. To be civil to him is only 
 to be laughed at when they are enemies." 
 
 The same spirit breathes through nearly all his 
 letters. Thus, for instance, he concluded a letter to 
 the British Minister at Vienna with these words : 
 "Down, do^vn with the French ought to be written in 
 the council-room of every country in the world, and 
 may Almighty God give right thoughts to every 
 sovereign is my constant prayer." 
 
 He seems to have had respect for every other 
 enemy that he met ; but for the French he had 
 nothing save contemptuous and unsparing hostility. 
 " Close with a Frenchman, but out-manceuvre a 
 Russian " was another of his favourite sayings. 
 This, it is to be hoped, is all past and gone ; but 
 it is instructive as giving us the key, not only to 
 Nelson's policy, but also to that spirit which made 
 the British man-of-warsmen of the day absolutely 
 prefer to fight the French at long odds than on 
 even terms. 
 
 It was this spirit which was embodied in another
 
 NELSON 201 
 
 of Nelson's pet phrases : " Any Englishman is 
 worth three Frenchmen." Of course that would 
 be all nonsense now ; but in justice to our neigh- 
 bours it ought to be remembered that the French- 
 men whom Nelson and his sailors met and con- 
 quered were the worst and not the best of their 
 nation. 
 
 The old navy of France, the navy which had 
 commanded the Eastern Seas in the days of Clive 
 and which had with impunity insulted the English 
 shores and brought an invading force into Ireland 
 in the time of William the Third no longer existed. 
 It had been essentially an aristocratic service like 
 our own, its officers were gentlemen and thorough 
 sailors, and its seamen were brave, disciplined, and 
 obedient. 
 
 But in her blood-drunkenness France had either 
 murdered or banished nearly every man who was fit 
 to command a ship or who knew how to point a 
 gun. The fleets of revolutionary France were for 
 the most part commanded by ignoramuses or 
 poltroons, or both, and manned by a rabble who 
 had neither stamina, training, or discipline. 
 
 Without the slightest wish to detract from the 
 splendour of the victories of Nelson or his comrades, 
 I still think it is only fair to point out again, as has 
 once or twice been done before, that when we read 
 of French Admirals declining battle even when 
 they had superior force, or of running away before 
 the battle was over, or of a small British squadron
 
 202 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 crumpling up a whole fleet with very trifling loss 
 to itself, we ought to remember that the French 
 Admirals had little or no confidence in their officers, 
 while the officers had still less either in their 
 admirals or their men. 
 
 On the other hand, such a man as Nelson, 
 Collingwood, or Hardy had simply to say that he 
 was going to do a certain thing to convince every 
 one serving under him that it was about as good as 
 already done. 
 
 This brings me naturally to one of Nelson's most 
 striking characteristics. No man who rose to dis- 
 tinction in the Navy was ever guilty of so many 
 barefaced acts of insubordination as he was. 
 Happily for him and for us his disobedience or 
 neglect of orders was always justified by victory. 
 The genius for supreme command, which was far 
 and away the strongest point in his character, 
 manifested itself very early in his career. The 
 event proved that he was the superior of every 
 naval officer then afloat, whether admiral or mid- 
 shipman, and he seemed instinctively to know it. 
 
 When he was commanding the old Agamemnon 
 in the Mediterranean, at the time when it was in 
 dispute whether Corsica should fall under the rule 
 of France or Britain, he fought two French ships, 
 the fa Ira and the Sans Culottes, for a whole day 
 and beat them. The next day a sort of general 
 action was fought, Admiral Hotham being in com- 
 mand of the British fleet. Nelson naturally wanted
 
 NELSON 203 
 
 a fight to a finish, but the Admiral was content 
 with the capture of two ships and the flight of the 
 rest, and in reply to Nelson's remonstrances he 
 said : ." We must be contented. We have done 
 very well." 
 
 In a letter home on the subject of this action, 
 Nelson penned a sentence which was at once pro- 
 phetic in itself and closely characteristic of the 
 writer. It was this : "I wish to be an Admiral 
 and in command of the English fleet. I should 
 very soon either do much or be ruined. 'My dis- 
 position cannot bear tame and slow measures. 
 Sure I am had I commanded on the i4th, that 
 either the whole French fleet would have graced 
 my triumph or I should have been in a con- 
 founded scrape." 
 
 That is Nelson's mental portrait drawn by him- 
 self. No half measures would ever do for him, 
 and in most of the letters that he sent home from 
 his various scenes of action, whether they were 
 written to his wife, his private friends, or the Lords 
 of the Admiralty, we find the constant complaint, 
 made with an insistence amounting almost to 
 petulance, that when he saw complete triumph 
 within his grasp his superiors either would not 
 help him to secure it or forced him to be content 
 with a mere temporary advantage. 
 
 Under such circumstances it was only natural 
 that such a man should now and then break loose. 
 He saw quite plainly that there were confused
 
 204 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 councils at home, and timid tactics afloat. He 
 saw also that under Napoleon the power of France 
 was growing every day. 
 
 The Board of Admiralty was apparently both 
 corrupt and incompetent. The Mediterranean fleet 
 had been so shamefully neglected that after Nelson 
 had fought an action off Toulon even he was afraid 
 to risk another without the certainty of victory 
 because there was " not so much as a mast to be 
 had east of Gibraltar," and he could not possibly 
 have refitted his ships. It was about this time 
 that he said in one of his letters home : 
 
 " I am acting, not only without the orders of my 
 commander-in-chief, but in some measure contrary 
 to him." 
 
 If the authorities at home had only had the same 
 opinion of his abilities as those had who were able 
 to watch his operations on the spot, and particularly 
 in Italy, it is quite possible that the whole history 
 of Europe might have been changed and that 
 Napoleon would never have won that series of 
 brilliant victories which cost such an infinity of 
 blood and treasure, and which bore no fruits but 
 such as resembled all too closely the fabled Dead 
 Sea apples. 
 
 Nelson's patriotism may have been of a somewhat 
 narrow-minded order, and his hatred of the French 
 may have partaken somewhat of the nature of 
 bigotry, but there can be no doubt that he was 
 the one man in Europe who saw what was
 
 NELSON 205 
 
 coming and had the ability, if he had only had 
 the power, to save the world from the horrors of 
 the Napoleonic wars. 
 
 Thus, for instance', if his advice had been taken, 
 the splendid victory of Aboukir Bay might have 
 been turned into the decisive battle of the war 
 which only ended with Waterloo. As it was, he 
 to some extent took the law into his own hands. 
 He saw perfectly well that Napoleon's ultimate 
 point of attack was not Egypt but India. He 
 sent an officer with dispatches to the Governor of 
 Bombay, advising him of the defeat of the French 
 Fleet, and in this dispatch he said : 
 
 " I know that Bombay was their first object if 
 they could get there, but I trust that now Almighty 
 God will overthrow in Egypt these pests of the 
 human race. Buonaparte has never yet had to 
 contend with an English officer, and I shall en- 
 deavour to make him respect us." 
 
 In another dispatch to the Admiralty he taught 
 a lesson which we have only lately begun to learn. 
 In those days of the old wooden- walls the handy, 
 light-heeled frigate was to the ships of the line 
 what the swift cruisers of to-day are to the big 
 battleships. They were the eyes and ears of the 
 fleet, and they could be sent on errands which 
 were impossible to the huge three-deckers. After 
 the battle of the Nile was won he said in this 
 dispatch : 
 
 "Were I to die this moment want of frigates
 
 206 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 would be found stamped on my heart. No words 
 of mine can express what I have suffered, and am 
 suffering, for want of them." 
 
 The inner meaning of these bitter words was 
 one of vast importance, not only to Britain, but 
 to all Europe. They meant really that the most 
 splendid victory that had so far been won at sea 
 had been robbed of half its results. For want of 
 the lighter craft, even of a few bomb-vessels and 
 fire-ships which he had implored the authorities to 
 send him, Napoleon's store-ships and transports 
 in the harbour of Alexandria escaped attack and 
 certain destruction. 
 
 Their destruction would have enabled Nelson 
 to carry out the policy which his genius had told 
 him was the only true one to pursue at this 
 momentous crisis. He would have cut off 
 Napoleon's communications and deprived him of 
 his supplies. Then he would have blockaded the 
 Egyptian Coast and left the future conqueror of 
 Austerlitz to perish amidst the sands of Egypt. 
 As he said to himself: "To Egypt they went 
 with their own consent, and there they shall 
 remain while Nelson commands this squadron 
 for never, never will he consent to the return of 
 one ship or Frenchman. I wish them to perish 
 in Egypt and give an awful lesson to the world 
 of the justice of the Almighty." 
 
 This was a pitiless pronouncement, but no one 
 who has read the history of the Napoleonic wars
 
 NELSON 207 
 
 can doubt the accuracy of Nelson's foresight or 
 the true humanity of his policy, for, if this had 
 happened only a few thousands out of the five 
 million lives which these wars are computed to 
 have cost would have been lost. There would 
 have been no Austerlitz, or Wagram, or Jena for 
 France to boast of; but, on the other hand, there 
 would have been no Leipsic, no Moscow, and no 
 Waterloo. 
 
 As usual, however, Nelson, although he had 
 magnificently restored the credit of the British 
 arms at sea, was crippled by shortness of means 
 and baulked by the stupidity and incompetence 
 of his masters at home. Sir Sidney Smith's 
 policy was preferred to his, with the result that 
 Napoleon was permitted to desert his army and 
 live to become the curse of Europe for the next 
 seventeen years. 
 
 But, if he did not do all he wanted to do, when 
 Nelson won the battle of the Nile he completely 
 established his claim to be considered one of the 
 Empire-makers of Britain, for if he had not 
 followed the French with that unerring judgment 
 of his, and if he had not, in defiance of all 
 accepted naval tactics, attacked them in what 
 was considered to be an unassailable position- 
 that is to say, moored off shore in two lines with 
 both ends protected by batteries all the work 
 that Clive and Hastings had done in India might 
 have been undone, and, considering the miserable
 
 208 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 state of our national defences, we might either 
 have lost India or had to wage such an exhaust- 
 ing war for it that we could not possibly have 
 taken the decisive share that we afterwards did in 
 the overthrow of the French power. 
 
 As he said in one of. his most famous utterances 
 while the British fleet was streaming into the bay : 
 " Where there is room for a Frenchman to swing, 
 there is room for an Englishman to get alongside 
 him." 
 
 That was Nelson. His idea was always to get 
 alongside, to get as close as possible to the enemy 
 and to hit him as hard as he could. Mere defeat 
 was not enough for him. He wanted a fight to 
 a finish, the finish being the absolute destruction 
 or capture of the hostile force. 
 
 This was not because there was anything par- 
 ticularly ferocious in his nature. On the contrary, 
 a more tender-hearted man never lived. 
 
 Before that one defeat of his at Teneriffe when 
 he lost his arm, he wrote to his Commander-in- 
 chief this letter, by the way, was the last he 
 ever wrote with his right hand expressing solici- 
 tude for everybody but himself. None knew 
 better than he the desperate nature of the 
 venture, for in this very letter he said that on 
 the morrow his head would probably be crowned 
 either with laurel or cypress, and the last thing 
 he did before he left his ship was to call his 
 stepson to help him in burning his wife's letters,
 
 NELSON 209 
 
 and then ordered him to remain behind, saying : 
 " Should we both fall, what would become of your 
 poor mother ? " 
 
 Happily Lieutenant Nisbet disobeyed the order 
 to his face and went. When the bullet shattered 
 Nelson's arm at the elbow, it was his stepson 
 who had the presence of mind to whip off his silk 
 handkerchief and bind it round above the wound. 
 But for this, Nelson would never have fought 
 another battle, for he must have bled to death 
 before he reached his ship. 
 
 It so happened that he could have been put 
 much sooner on board the Sea Horse, but her 
 commander, Captain Freemantle, was still on 
 shore, and, for all he knew, might be dead or 
 alive. His wife was on board the Sea Horse, 
 and Nelson, wounded and bleeding as he was, 
 insisted on going on, saying : " I would rather 
 suffer death than alarm Mrs. Freemantle by 
 letting her see me in this state when I can 
 give her no tidings of her husband." Free- 
 mantle, as it turned out, had been wounded in 
 almost exactly the same place only a few minutes 
 before. 
 
 When Nelson got back to his own ship, he 
 would not hear of being slung or carried up 
 on deck. 
 
 " I've got one arm and two legs left," he said, 
 "and I'll get up by myself." 
 
 And so he did, and up a single rope at that. 
 
 15
 
 210 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 In a strong man this would have been wonderful; 
 in a mere weakling as Nelson physically was, it 
 was little short of a miracle. 
 
 This was the man who, in the Battle of Cape 
 St. Vincent, with an utterly disabled ship, boarded 
 and took two Spanish men-of-war both bigger than 
 his own. One of them had eighty and the other a 
 hundred and twelve guns ; his own only mounted 
 seventy-four. 
 
 It is, of course, entirely out of the question that 
 in such a mere sketch as this I should attempt to 
 follow Nelson through even a moderate proportion 
 of the hundred and five engagements in which he 
 personally fought, nor would it be fitting that I 
 should attempt to emulate the brilliant and detailed 
 descriptions which have illustrated the principal of 
 them. 
 
 With his doings at Naples and Palermo, and his 
 much-debated and inexplicable attachment to Lady 
 Hamilton which unhappily began during this period, 
 we have here no concern. The hero of the Nile, 
 like every other great man, had his faults. Those 
 who cavil at them are really blaming their pos- 
 sessors for not being perfect, for if really great 
 men had no faults they would be perfect, and that 
 is impossible, and, so much being said, the scene 
 may now shift forthwith from the Mediterranean 
 to the Baltic. 
 
 The Armed Neutrality is now only a phrase in 
 history, but in the year 1801 it was a very serious
 
 NELSON 211 
 
 reality. It was a league between Russia, Sweden, 
 and Denmark. From the English point of view 
 it meant this that France, with whom we had now 
 practically embarked in a struggle to the death, 
 would be able, under the sanction of this league, 
 to import from the shores of the Baltic the very 
 articles that we did not wish her to have, and which 
 she couldn't get elsewhere. These were naval 
 stores, pine-trees for masts and spars, hemp for 
 rigging, tar, and so on. 
 
 It was very easy to see that this Armed Neutrality 
 meant in plain English that these three Powers were 
 quite agreeable to the smashing-up of Great Britain 
 by France provided that they were not called upon 
 to pay any of the expenses or suffer any of the other 
 losses of the war. Denmark was therefore politely 
 but firmly requested to detach herself from this 
 league, the reason being that Denmark in those 
 days kept the key of the Baltic. Denmark refused, 
 and unhappily for her she did so just at the time 
 when the Victor of the Nile had come home for a 
 well-earned holiday. 
 
 We are not accustomed now, in the pride of our 
 unequalled naval strength, to take very much ac- 
 count of the fleets of these three countries, but 
 just before the Battle of the Baltic was fought it 
 was a very different matter. 
 
 The Danes had twenty-three line-of-battle ships 
 and thirty-one frigates, not counting bomb-vessels 
 and guard-ships. Sweden had eighteen ships of the
 
 212 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 line, fourteen frigates and sloops and seventy-four 
 galleys, as well as a small swarm of gun-boats, 
 while Russia could put to sea eighty-two line-of- 
 battle ships and forty-two frigates. 
 
 Such a force within the narrow waters of the 
 Baltic was a very formidable one, but before we 
 can arrive at a just appreciation of the magnificence 
 and importance of the service which Nelson did for 
 his country we must remember that of all European 
 waters those of the Baltic, and especially of the 
 approaches to it, are the most difficult and dangerous. 
 Even with the aid of steam it would be no light 
 matter to take a fleet into the Baltic under the guns 
 of Elsinore and Kronberg were the lamps of the 
 lighthouses extinguished and all the buoys removed. 
 
 What then must it have been to go in with a fleet 
 of sailing ships utterly at the mercy of wind and 
 current, to say nothing of the ice ? Indeed, Southey 
 tells us that when Nelson went to Yarmouth to join 
 the fleet under Admiral Sir Hyde-Parker he found 
 him a little nervous about dark nights and ice-floes. 
 
 His own remarks on the subject are very well 
 worthy ol remembrance : " These are not times for 
 nervous systems," he said. " I hope we shall give 
 our northern enemies that hailstorm of bullets which 
 gives our dear country the dominion of the sea. We 
 have it and all the devils in the North cannot take it 
 from us if our wooden walls have fair play." 
 
 It was a most egregious mistake not to have made 
 the Victor of the Nile and the Conqueror of the
 
 NELSON 213 
 
 Mediterranean commander-in-chief of the Northern 
 Squadron. His fame was already resounding 
 through the world, and every one except the 
 Lords of the Admiralty seems to have already 
 recognised the fact that he was by far the finest 
 sailor of the age. 
 
 Here again, too, officialism at home sadly crippled 
 the work of valour and genius abroad. As usual 
 Nelson had his own plans, and as usual they were 
 the very best possible. His idea was to attack the 
 Russian Squadron in Reval and the Danish in 
 Copenhagen simultaneously, and by preventing 
 their coalition make it too risky for the Swedes 
 to join in. 
 
 Captain Mahan, who is certainly entitled to be 
 considered one of the foremost naval authorities of 
 the day, describes Nelson's plan of attack as worthy 
 of Napoleon himself, and says that if adopted it 
 " would have brought down the Baltic Confederacy 
 with a crash that would have resounded throughout 
 Europe." As it was, more timid counsels prevailed, 
 but thanks to Nelson the end was the same, or 
 nearly so. 
 
 We may gather some notion of the difficulty of 
 getting on to the scene of battle when we read that 
 no less than three English line-of-battle ships went 
 aground before the battle began, and we also get an 
 interesting glimpse of that old hand-to-hand style of 
 naval warfare which has now passed away for ever, 
 when we are told that the ships opened fire at a
 
 214 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 range of two hundred yards ! Nowadays firing would 
 begin at between three and four thousand. If two 
 modern fleets were to get to business at that range 
 the said business would probably consist of one 
 broadside from each, one discharge of the big guns, 
 and after that general wreck and ruin. It is not 
 likely that either side would win, and it is certain 
 that both sides would lose. 
 
 From ten to one the battle raged fast and furious, 
 and so much damage had been done on the English 
 side that Sir Hyde-Parker made a signal to leave oft 
 action. It was at this moment that Nelson uttered 
 those immortal words, which were destined to be as 
 famous even as his signal at Trafalgar : 
 
 " What ? Leave off action ? No, damn me if I 
 do ! You know, Foley, I have a right to be blind 
 sometimes. No, I really don't see the signal. Fire 
 away ! " 
 
 Those were days of hard swearing as well as hard 
 hitting, and, considering all the circumstances, even 
 the purest of modern purists may forgive a little 
 vehemence of expression to the man who that day 
 did such good work, not only for our grandfathers, 
 but for us and our children. 
 
 An hour or so later Nelson performed one of the 
 most memorable actions even of his life. The 
 Danish ships and floating batteries were moored 
 in-shore. The fire of the English guns was, as 
 usual, terribly accurate, but as fast as the Danes 
 were shot down, fresh crews were put on board
 
 r 
 
 NELSON AT COPENHAGEN. 
 (Page 214.)
 
 NELSON 215 
 
 the ships, and Nelson very soon saw that this simply 
 meant butchery as long as a Danish ship floated. 
 
 Consequently he sat down and wrote a note to the 
 Crown Prince of Denmark which he sent on shore 
 under a flag of truce. This was the letter : 
 
 " Lord Nelson has directions to spare Denmark 
 when no longer resisting, but if the firing is con- 
 tinued on the part of Denmark, Lord Nelson will 
 be obliged to set on fire all the floating batteries 
 he has taken without having the power of saving 
 the brave Danes who have defended them." 
 
 The result of this letter was a truce, and the truce 
 led to an armistice and the separation of Denmark 
 from the Armed Neutrality. This was very different 
 treatment, we may well imagine, to anything that the 
 French might have expected. In their case he con- 
 sidered extermination to be the only remedy for the 
 disease which in his eyes they represented on earth. 
 
 It was curious that after such a day's work this 
 man, who had probably saved Europe from one 
 of the greatest menaces that ever threatened it, 
 should go back to his cabin and copy out love 
 verses to send to Lady Hamilton and yet that is 
 just what he did, and at the end of them he wrote : 
 " St. George, April 2nd, 1801, at 9 o'clock at night. 
 Very tired after a hard fought battle." 
 
 The Battle of Copenhagen and the death of the 
 Tsar Paul put an end to the Northern Confederacy 
 and to all the hopes of France in that direction. 
 But Nelson was not satisfied, for the Russian fleet
 
 216 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 had escaped. He was, however, in some measure 
 consoled by the recall of Sir Hyde-Parker and the 
 realisation of his old ambition by his own appoint- 
 ment as commander-in-chief. 
 
 His next service was as commander of a sort of 
 patrol fleet on the East Coast. Those were the days 
 of the great invasion scare. Nelson never believed 
 in it. In one of his letters to Lord Addington on 
 the subject he said : 
 
 "What a forlorn undertaking! It is perfectly 
 right to be prepared against a mad government, 
 but with the active force your lordship has given me 
 I may pronounce it impracticable." 
 
 Soon after this, preliminaries of peace were signed, 
 and to Nelson's intense disgust the French Ambas- 
 sador was enthusiastically received in London. 
 Writing to his physician soon after he said : 
 
 " Can you cure madness ? for I am mad that our 
 damned scoundrels dragged the Frenchman's car- 
 nage. I am ashamed for my country." 
 
 The Peace was hollow and brief, for the mastery 
 of the sea was not yet decided, and by the middle of 
 1803 we find Nelson back in the Mediterranean, not 
 blockading Toulon, but rather trying to tempt the 
 French out to a battle. 
 
 He even went so far as to appear to run away, 
 and the French Admiral, Latouche-Treville, promptly 
 wrote a letter giving a most glowing account of how 
 he had chased the English away from Toulon. The 
 idea of a Frenchman daring to say such a thing
 
 NELSON 217 
 
 naturally made Nelson furious. Writing about it to 
 his brother he said : 
 
 "If this fleet gets fairly up with M. Latouche his 
 letter with all his ingenuity must be different from 
 his last. We had fancied that we had chased him 
 into Toulon, but from the time of his meeting Cap- 
 tain Hawker of the Isis I never heard of his acting 
 otherwise than as a poltroon and a liar. I am 
 keeping his letter, and if I take him* by God he 
 shall eat it." 
 
 This amiable design, however, the French Ad- 
 miral baulked by dying, and when Nelson heard the 
 news he remarked half-angrily : " He is gone, and all 
 his lies with him." 
 
 That is what he thought of the Admiral. This 
 is what he thought of the fleet : " The French fleet 
 yesterday was to appearance in high feather and as 
 fine as paint could make them. Our weather-beaten 
 ships, I have no fear, will make their sides like a 
 plum-pudding." 
 
 The interval between the ending of the Toulon 
 blockade and the Battle of Trafalgar was filled chiefly 
 by what may be described as a huge naval hunt. 
 On the one hand, there were three French fleets 
 manoeuvring to get out and come together in the 
 Channel with the object of overwhelming any Eng- 
 lish force that might try to prevent the embarkation 
 of the Grand Army at Boulogne. But they had 
 another object, and that was to get as far as pos- 
 sible out of Nelson's way.
 
 218 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 The first idea was to make a feint at the West 
 Indies, and so away went Admiral Villeneuve with 
 his fleet across the Atlantic, and away went Nelson 
 post-haste after him. He got to the West Indies 
 only to find that the Frenchmen had doubled on 
 their tracks and gone back again, and so he im- 
 mediately turned the prows of his weather-beaten 
 and almost unseaworthy ships to the eastward, and 
 for the second time chased the French across the 
 Atlantic. But he missed them again, and on July 
 20, 1805, Nelson made an entry in his diary to 
 the effect that he had that day gone ashore at 
 Gibraltar the first time that he had left the Victory 
 for two years all but ten days ! 
 
 From Gibraltar he came home and spent a few 
 weeks of rest at Merton, the estate which he had 
 bought in Surrey. During this time a momentous 
 naval duel was fought in the Channel. Admiral 
 Villeneuve had sent some very important dispatches 
 containing the plans for the concentration of the 
 French and Spanish fleets to the commander of the 
 Rochefort squadron by the Didon, a forty-four-gun 
 frigate ; but on her way the Didon was met by the 
 Pho2nix, an English forty-gun frigate which, after 
 the fashion of the times, proceeded to pound her to 
 helplessness, then ran alongside and carried her by 
 the board in the good old style. The result of this 
 was that Villeneuve gave up all hope of the concen- 
 tration and retreated to Cadiz, where he anchored 
 on August 1 7th.
 
 NELSON 219 
 
 Admiral Collingwood, in command of the Atlantic 
 squadron, at once sent off the frigate Euryahts home 
 with news. She dropped anchor at Spithead on the 
 ist of September. At five o'clock the next morn- 
 ing her captain presented himself at Merton and 
 found Nelson already up and dressed. The moment 
 Captain Blackwood entered the room Nelson's face 
 lit up and he said : 
 
 "I'm sure you bring me news of the French and 
 Spanish fleets and I think I shall have to give them 
 a beating yet. Depend upon it, Blackwood, I shall 
 yet give Mr. Villeneuve a drubbing." 
 
 He left for London the same day to consult with 
 the Admiralty, and it was on one of the visits that 
 he then paid to the Secretary of State that he met 
 for a few minutes and for the only time in his life 
 the man whose name was destined to be linked 
 with his in everlasting fame. This was Arthur 
 Wellesley, some day to be Duke of Wellington, 
 who was to do for the French on land what Nelson 
 had been doing for them at sea. 
 
 Sir Arthur came away with a curious opinion of 
 the little, pale, nervous, fidgety, one-armed man, 
 who had won the two greatest battles in the history 
 of naval warfare, and was about to surpass himself 
 by winning yet a greater one. 
 
 From one point of view he was a vain, boastful, 
 and somewhat womanish little man. From another, 
 he was not only a great leader of men, but a states- 
 man to boot. On the whole, the future Iron Duke
 
 220 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 came to the conclusion that the Hero of the Nile 
 was "a very superior person." 
 
 Nelson's opinion of Wellington is unhappily lost 
 to posterity. One can imagine the sort of language 
 he would have used if any one had told him that a 
 soldier had ventured to call him " a superior person." 
 
 " For charity's sake, send us Lord Nelson, ye 
 men of power." Such was the prayer of Captain 
 Codrington of the Orion, serving with Colling- 
 wood's fleet off Cadiz. But by the time this letter 
 got home Nelson was with the fleet, and it is 
 worthy of note that he reached the last and most 
 glorious of his hundred battlefields on his birthday, 
 the twenty-ninth of September. 
 
 The first thing that he did was to send home for 
 more ships, not because he wasn't ready to fight the 
 French with what he had, but simply in pursuance 
 of his constant policy with regard to them. In his 
 dispatch to the Admiralty he said : 
 
 " Should they come out, I shall immediately 
 bring them to battle, but though I should not doubt 
 of spoiling any voyage they may attempt, yet I 
 hope for the arrival of the ships from England that 
 as an enemy's fleet they may be annihilated." 
 
 In a private letter which he wrote at the same 
 time he said : 
 
 " It is annihilation that the country wants and 
 not merely a splendid victory of twenty-three to 
 thirty-six honourable to the parties concerned, but 
 absolutely useless in the extended scale to bring
 
 NELSON 221 
 
 Buonaparte to his marrow-bones. Numbers can 
 only annihilate. Therefore I hope the Admiralty 
 will send the fixed force as soon as possible." 
 
 He hoped for forty sail of the line, but when the 
 ever memorable morning of the 2ist had dawned 
 he was only able to muster twenty-seven against 
 thirty-three. At half-past eleven the famous signal : 
 " England expects that every man will do his 
 duty ! " flew from the main-royal of the Victory. 
 
 I have no intention of attempting to re-write the 
 thousand-times told tale of Trafalgar or of the 
 disaster which plunged the nation into mourning in 
 the midst of the exultation of triumph, for to do so 
 would be alike superflous and impertinent. Let it 
 be enough to point out that the firing of the first 
 gun marked the moment that Nelson had lived and 
 fought for. 
 
 He was Commander-in-chief, as he had so often 
 prayed to be, of the British Fleet, and there in 
 front of him was the last fleet of any strength that 
 his hated enemy France could muster. The battle, 
 like the triumph, was his and his alone. Every 
 man who that day did his duty fought by Nelson's 
 directions and, as it were, under Nelson's eye, and 
 never was victory more complete or defeat more 
 crushing. 
 
 When it was over eighteen out of the thirty-three 
 French and Spanish ships had been captured, and 
 finally only eleven got back to Cadiz so shattered 
 that they never again took the sea as men-of-war.
 
 222 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 The crowning triumph of Nelson's life left Britain 
 without a rival so far as the mastery of the sea was 
 concerned and threw the way open for conquest 
 and colonisation in all parts of the world. Well 
 might the great Admiral say when he lay dying in 
 Captain Hardy's arms: "Thank God, I've done 
 my duty ! " 
 
 No man ever died with nobler or more truly 
 spoken words on his lips than these, for he had not 
 only given his country the empire of the sea, but he 
 had saved her from invasion by one who was 
 perhaps the greatest military genius the world has 
 known. 
 
 On the heights above Boulogne there stands a 
 tall column surmounted by a figure of Napoleon. 
 It was raised to commemorate the assembly of the 
 Grand Army that army which during the next ten 
 years swept in an irresistible torrent of conquest 
 from one end of Europe to the other. Napoleon's 
 back is turned on the white cliffs of England. If 
 Nelson had never lived, he might have been facing 
 the other way.
 
 X 
 
 WELLINGTON 
 
 "THE PRIDE AND THE GENIUS OF HIS COUNTKY." 
 
 QUEEN VICTORIA.
 
 X 
 
 WELLINGTON 
 
 THERE is a very considerable amount of un- 
 certainty, and there are also a few some- 
 what remarkable coincidences associated with the 
 early youth of Arthur Wesley, better known to 
 fame under the expanded form Wellesley, son of 
 Garret, Earl of Mornington, and his wife Ann Hill, 
 one of the daughters of Lord Dungannon. 
 
 It is somewhat singular, for instance, that the 
 birthday of a child born in such a position should 
 not be known within a day or two. His mother, 
 who ought to have spoken with authority, said that 
 the future conqueror of the great Napoleon entered 
 the world on May-Day, 1769. 
 
 The date on his baptismal certificate is the 3Oth 
 of May, and twenty-one years later a committee of 
 the Irish House of Commons, to which he had just 
 been elected, investigated the question on a petition 
 which sought to show that he was not of full age, 
 and this committee decided that he was born on or 
 before the 2 9th of April. With regard to this latter 
 date, however, it has been suggested that with the 
 
 1 6 22 s
 
 226 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 money and influence that he had behind him there 
 would have been no difficulty in getting the Irish 
 Parliament of those days to make him any age that 
 he pleased. 
 
 But these things are only trifles. The fact of 
 moment to the world is that Arthur Wellesley 
 managed to get born into the world some three 
 months before a certain other boy-baby was born 
 at Ajaccio in Corsica. No one, of course, dreamt 
 then that these two babies were going to grow up 
 into Titans whose final struggle for the mastery of 
 Europe was to shake the world forty-six years later. 
 
 There is perhaps no more noteworthy coincidence 
 in modern history than the fact that Nelson, 
 Wellington, and Napoleon should all have been 
 born about the same time for without Nelson's 
 victories at sea, Napoleon would in all probability 
 have been irresistible on land, while, without 
 Wellington's splendid conduct of the Peninsular 
 War, the crowning victory of Waterloo would 
 perhaps never have been won, and so at least 
 half the effects of Nelson's hundred and five fights 
 would have been destroyed. 
 
 This is all the more singular from the fact that 
 nothing within the limits of human probability save 
 the supreme genius and individual capacity of this 
 Englishman and this Anglo- Irishman could possibly 
 have stemmed the tide of Napoleonic conquest. 
 
 As I have pointed out in another of these 
 sketches, the last decade but one of the eighteenth
 
 WELLINGTON 227 
 
 century was one of disaster and degradation for this 
 country both at home and abroad. The national 
 strength was sapped by corruption, and the national 
 spirit was daunted by defeat. 
 
 The history of the next thirty or forty years 
 distinctly shows that we had but one Nelson at sea, 
 and but one Wellington on land. If they had been 
 born a quarter of a century later, or even if they 
 had not both come into the world about the same 
 time as their mighty antagonist, the map of Europe 
 would certainly be very different to what it is to-day, 
 and it is also fairly safe to say that the map of the 
 world would not now show nearly as much red as 
 it does. 
 
 Arthur Wellesley, like certain others of our 
 Empire-Makers who will be remembered, was a 
 delicate, weakly boy and also, curiously enough, a 
 dunce at school. As far as we know he was first 
 sent to a school at Chelsea, whence in due course 
 he went to Eton. Now there came a time when 
 Eton was very proud indeed of being his Alma- 
 Mater ; but when she came to look back to see if 
 she could remember anything about him she found 
 that his career was absolutely undistinguished. 
 
 There was only one incident in it all that any 
 one remembered, and that was a fight that he had 
 had with one Bob or " Bobus " Smith, of whom also 
 nothing is known save the fact that he had a 
 brother who was afterwards known to the world as 
 Sydney Smith not the defender of Acre, but the
 
 228 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 clerical humourist who divided the human race into 
 three sexes : Men, women, and curates. 
 
 It would seem that he was all along intended 
 for the army, for when his undistinguished career 
 at Eton had closed he went to a French military 
 school at Angers, somewhere about the same time 
 that a certain young cadet of Artillery was begin- 
 ing to learn his business in Toulon. Here, again, 
 we get very dim glimpses of the future conqueror, 
 Empire- Maker, and preserver. One of them, how- 
 ever, is fairly distinct. He had a little terrier 
 called Vick to which he was a great deal more 
 attentive than he was to his studies and which 
 repaid his attention by constant and unswerving 
 devotion. 
 
 When he left Angers is not known to a year or 
 so, but in 1787 we come across something definite, 
 for in this year Arthur Wesley, as he still spelt 
 himself, was gazetted as ensign to His Majesty's 
 73rd Regiment of Foot. 
 
 He now stood on the lowest of the gentlemanly 
 rungs of the military ladder and his upward pro- 
 gress was for a time somewhat bewildering. Those 
 were the days when money and social and political 
 influence, which came to about the same thing, did 
 everything in the Army, the Navy, the Church, and 
 everywhere else, and, curiously enough, this ap- 
 parently absurd system produced the finest array of 
 soldiers and sailors that has ever adorned the annals 
 of our empire. There are, indeed, certain bias-
 
 WELLINGTON 229 
 
 phemers who venture to suggest that it worked 
 quite as well as our much-boasted compound of 
 mechanical cramming and competitive examination 
 does now. 
 
 But, be this as it may, Arthur Wesley's first steps 
 up the ladder were distinctly erratic. First he 
 became a lieutenant of the 76th and 4ist, then a 
 sub. in the i2th Light Dragoons, then a captain in 
 the 58th Foot, then captain of the i8th Light 
 Dragoons, and so on till by the autumn of 1793, 
 when he had reached the mature age of twenty- 
 four, he was gazetted lieutenant-colonel of the 33rd 
 Foot. 
 
 There were two reasons for this rapid promotion. 
 The first undoubtedly is the fact that his elder 
 brother Richard was now Earl of Mornington and 
 a wealthy man and a social power to boot. The 
 second, as Mr. George Hooper in his excellent 
 biography suggests, is probably the perception by 
 his brother of qualities which so far nobody else 
 had discovered. 
 
 How far his Lordship was justified was speedily 
 shown when in 1793 which the historical reader 
 will note was the date of the driving out of the 
 English and Royalists from Toulon by the well- 
 directed guns of Citizen Buonaparte he was given 
 the command of the 33rd Foot. A few months 
 later the 33rd was officially recognised as the most 
 effective regiment on the Irish establishment. 
 
 The next year Lieutenant-Colonel Wesley saw
 
 230 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 his first active service. It was not an encouraging 
 experience, but it was sufficient to show the sort of 
 stuff that the future Iron Duke was made of. The 
 allied armies in the Netherlands, with the English 
 under the Duke of York among them, were retreat- 
 ing after a series of disasters before the triumphant 
 onrush of the French legions. 
 
 Near the town of Boxtell the retreat began to 
 get uncomfortably like a rout. Horse and foot were 
 getting mixed up in a narrow lane and the French, 
 seeing this, were getting ready to charge into them ; 
 whereupon Colonel Wesley planted his men skilfully 
 across the mouth of the lane and, when the French 
 charged, the well-drilled 33rd stood so steadily and 
 used their muskets with such deadly precision that 
 the French thought better of it and the pursuit 
 stopped there and then. 
 
 That was the young Colonel's first experience of 
 actual war. It was also the first check the French 
 had so far received in the Netherlands, which is 
 also significant in the light of after events. 
 
 After that he commanded the rear-guard in the 
 retreat to the British transports at Bremen. He 
 did his duty as well as the hopeless carelessless and 
 incompetency of those over and above him per- 
 mitted. "It was a perfect marvel," he said after- 
 wards, "how a single man of us escaped," from which 
 it will be gathered that British military genius and 
 discipline were somewhat at a discount during the 
 campaign which we may regard as the prelude to
 
 WELLINGTON 231 
 
 the stupendous struggle which was to culminate on 
 the field of Waterloo. 
 
 When Colonel Wesley got home he did a very 
 curious thing. He asked to be allowed to resign 
 his commission and to be given some post, however 
 humble, in the Civil Service. It is easy to see from 
 his letter of application to Lord Camden that he 
 was utterly disgusted with the Army, or rather with 
 the way in which it was mismanaged. He also 
 felt, as he distinctly says, that he had in him the 
 makings of a successful financier, and certainly if 
 great business capacity, instantaneous knowledge of 
 men, unequalled power of organisation, and abso- 
 lutely tireless energy are the principal requisites for 
 commercial success, Arthur Wesley might have died 
 a millionaire. 
 
 Happily, however, Lord Camden refused to grant 
 his request. No doubt the Earl of Mornington had 
 something to say about it and good officers were quite 
 rare enough just then to make the abilities of the 
 Colonel of the 33rd fairly conspicuous. Soon after 
 this he had an attack of yellow fever in Ireland, 
 probably by infection, which very nearly killed him. 
 Just at this time too, that is to say the end of 1795, 
 an expedition was organised to the West Indies 
 and the 33rd were to form part of it. 
 
 It is interesting to us with our wind-defying 
 
 monsters of steel and steam to learn that the 
 
 squadron tried for six weeks to get out of the 
 
 , Channel and then had to come back. By this time
 
 232 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 the destination of the expedition had been changed 
 from the West to the East Indies. The Colonel of 
 the 33rd was too ill to sail with his regiment. A 
 swift frigate enabled him to overtake it at the Cape ; 
 but for all that he was nearly thirteen months before 
 he got to Calcutta. 
 
 Arthur Wellesley, as he now began to sign himself, 
 although nothing more in the eyes of his comrades 
 and commanders than a Colonel of Foot who was a 
 good disciplinarian and a promising soldier, had now 
 entered that theatre on the stage of which he was 
 to play a brilliant part to a world-wide audience. 
 
 Nearly thirteen years before Warren Hastings 
 had finished his work and gone home to take his 
 reward in impeachment and ruin. The brilliant 
 administration of Lord Cornwallis and the less con- 
 spicuous rule of Sir John Shore were now to be 
 followed by a double command which was to extend, 
 complete, and crown the great work of empire- 
 making in the East which had begun when Robert 
 Clive left his desk to go and capture Arcot. 
 
 A few weeks after Colonel Wellesley landed in Cal- 
 cutta, his brilliant brother, the Earl of Mornington 
 took his seat on the Viceregal throne. No happier 
 combination could well have been possible. The 
 elder brother was a scholar, a statesman, and a 
 broad-minded man of affairs. The younger was, 
 even then, the same man who won Vittoria, Talavera, 
 and Waterloo. 
 
 The two acted in perfect unison. There was
 
 WELLINGTON 233 
 
 none of that bungling timidity and incompetency in 
 high places which confused the counsels and crippled 
 the activity of Robert Clive and Warren Hastings, 
 and the result was, as might have been expected, a 
 succession of triumphs won, be it noted, not only 
 by consummate generalship, but also by incessant 
 vigilance and hard work resulting in perfect organi- 
 sation. 
 
 These triumphs culminated, as every one knows, 
 in the crushing of the Mahratta power the last 
 serious obstacle to the universality of British rule in 
 India on the memorial field of Assaye. 
 
 It was a magnificent combination of courage, 
 calculation, and generalship. With a force of five 
 thousand men and eighteen guns and with only two 
 thousand European troops in his army, Wellesley 
 defeated and utterly cut up an army of over forty 
 thousand men and an artillery force of a hundred 
 guns, and these, too, were the finest native fighting 
 troops in the Peninsula. In less than three hours 
 after the first assault the five thousand had con-- 
 quered the forty thousand and captured a hundred 
 and two guns and all the stores and ammunition, 
 and it should always be remembered that Assaye 
 was a very different business to Plassey. It was a 
 battle, not a rout, a tragedy rather than a farce. 
 Of the two thousand Europeans over four hundred 
 were killed and wounded, and of the three thousand 
 natives, who fought magnificently as they have ever 
 since done in company with British troops, there
 
 234 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 were no less than sixteen hundred killed and 
 wounded. 
 
 As for Wellesley himself, he was wherever he was 
 wanted, and that was usually in the thick of the 
 fight. But there is another fact which gives us a 
 glimpse of the great general who was the master 
 spirit of the Peninsular Campaign. His men fought 
 the battle of Assaye at the end of a twenty-four 
 mile march, and no military force that is not com- 
 manded by a military genius could do that. 
 
 There were other actions after Assaye, but it was 
 there that the final blow was really struck. Holkar, 
 it is true, had seemed to turn the tide for the time, 
 but in the December of 1804 General Lake finally 
 crumpled him up. In March, 1805, the Colonel of 
 the 33rd, now Sir Arthur Wellesley, sailed from 
 Madras in the frigate Tridant. We may pause to 
 note that in the following July he wrote from the 
 Island of St. Helena to tell his brother that his 
 health, which had been very bad, was now restored. 
 
 He said : " I was wasting away daily, and latterly 
 when at Madras, I found my strength failed which 
 had before held out." If his strength really had 
 failed, it is quite probable that St. Helena would 
 never have known its most distinguished resident. 
 
 A short time after, Wellington returned to 
 England he was known just then as the " Sepoy 
 General " William Pitt remarked that he was at 
 a loss which most to admire his modesty or his 
 talents, and he added that " he had never met with
 
 WELLINGTON 235 
 
 any military officer with whom it was so satisfactory 
 to converse." This was a saying both accurate 
 and just, and it must be admitted that there is a 
 very considerable difference between the dispatches 
 which Nelson wrote and those which Wellington 
 sent home after his greatest victories. 
 
 It was during this brief stay at home that the 
 one little romance of Wellington's life had a happy 
 "finis" written to it. In the days before he had 
 given any public sign of the great genius that was 
 in him, he had wooed Lady Catherine Pakenham, 
 a daughter of Lord Longford. Not possibly with- 
 out apparent reason, Lord and Lady Longford 
 came to the conclusion that he was an altogether 
 ineligible person, and refused their consent, and 
 Arthur Wesley sailed away to the East, disconsolate 
 but not despairing. 
 
 It is pleasant to be able to look over his shoulder 
 just before he returned, and read a letter in which 
 Lady Catherine tells him that such beauty as she 
 had has been ravaged by small-pox. It is pleasanter 
 still to know that this information by no means 
 cooled his ardour to get home, and that when he 
 did come back a Major-General, the victor in many 
 fights, and Sir Arthur Wellesley, my Lord and my 
 Lady had reversed their decision, and the course of 
 true love was allowed to run with perfectly satis- 
 factory smoothness. 
 
 Just before this he entered Parliament as member 
 for Rye, on the invitation of Lord Grenville. One
 
 236 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 didn't need much more than the invitation of a 
 powerful minister to get into Parliament in those 
 days. At Westminster he distinguished himself 
 chiefly as the vindicator of his brother's policy in 
 India, and, more than this, he used his pen, which 
 was not much addicted to flourishes, but neverthe- 
 less wrote good, strong, nervous English, to the 
 same good purpose. There is one sentence in an 
 open letter to his brother which exactly sums up 
 the situation. 
 
 " By your firmness and decision you have not 
 only saved, but enlarged and secured the invaluable 
 Empire entrusted to your government at a time 
 when everything else was a wreck, and the exis- 
 tence even of Great Britain was problematic." 
 
 Those are weighty words indeed, coming as they 
 do from the man who won the battle of Assaye and 
 established, let us hope for ever, the British Empire 
 in India. 
 
 All the same he doesn't seem to have liked this 
 talking business in Parliament at all, for in a letter 
 written in July, 1806, he says: "You will have 
 seen that I am in Parliament, and a difficult and 
 most unpleasant game I have had to play in the 
 present extraordinary state of parties." From this 
 it will be seen that Arthur Wellesley, like any 
 other good man of action and capable Empire- 
 Maker, had a wholesome contempt for the miserable 
 and sordid game which is called party politics. 
 
 All the same we find him a few months after-
 
 WELLINGTON 237 
 
 wards as Chief Secretary for Ireland, buying, that 
 is to say bribing and corrupting with open candour 
 and unconcealed disgust, a sufficiency of votes and 
 influence to keep the Ministry in power. He said 
 plainly: "Almost every man of mark in the state 
 has his price." And when he was taxed with 
 bribery and corruption, he remarked with that 
 marvellous insight of his, that an inquiry into such 
 practices would open up the whole theory of con- 
 stitutional government. 
 
 We are supposed to have improved ourselves out 
 of the venality of buying and selling votes and seats, 
 at any rate for cash down, but we still bribe and 
 we still corrupt. There are still titles for rich men 
 who will spend lavishly to support their party, there 
 are still innumerable advantages for the tradesman, 
 and the contractor who are loyal to their party and 
 their ticket, and so it will be while constitutional 
 government and human nature remain what they 
 are ; but for all that we may learn a good deal from 
 a remark like this made by a man who was so 
 absolutely incorruptible that when he was made 
 Captain-General of the Spanish Army, he refused 
 to draw his salary, and who later on when his justly 
 grateful country presented him with an estate, paid 
 the rent of it into the Treasury as long as the war 
 lasted. 
 
 It is not often, even among the great ones of the 
 earth, that you meet with an absolutely honest man, 
 but there is no doubt about Wellington.
 
 238 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 After a little subordinate foreign service in Den- 
 mark, in which he distinguished himself as usual, 
 he went back to the Irish office for about eight 
 months. This particular eight months was a very 
 critical period indeed, and looking back at the facts 
 across a gulf of eighty years, one is inclined to 
 wonder how it was that no better work could be 
 found for the already well-proved genius of Arthur 
 Wellesley than the ordinary routine work which a 
 very much smaller man could have done, if not as 
 well, at least sufficiently well. It will have been 
 noticed more than once by those who have 
 managed to get through the foregoing pages, that 
 one of the greatest and most dangerous faults of 
 British officialism, has been the employment of 
 giants to do the work of pigmies. But officialism 
 would not be official if it were not dull, so I sup- 
 pose there is no help for it. One of the elements 
 of greatness is the faculty of recognising greatness 
 in others, and officialism's very seldom great. 
 
 This was the year 1807, and that is the same 
 thing as saying that it was the period which marked 
 the zenith of Napoleon's power. The little cadet 
 of Artillery who had been teaching the raw re- 
 publicans of France how to construct fortifications, 
 and how to knock them down, while Arthur Welles- 
 ley was training the 33rd Foot, was now Emperor 
 of the French. 
 
 More than that, he was practically master of 
 Europe. From the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural
 
 WELLINGTON 239 
 
 mountains he had not a single foe left in arms. 
 Some he had crushed, others he had over-awed or 
 conciliated, but all the nations of Europe were 
 either his subjects or his forced allies. Nelson, it 
 is true, had made Britain the mistress of the seas, 
 but, saving only these little islands of ours, it must 
 be confessed that Napoleon was master of the land. 
 
 There was, however, just one weak point, one 
 loose joint, as it were, in the armour of the conquer- 
 ing Colossus who now bestrode the Continent from 
 one end to the other. 
 
 If you take the map of Europe you will see that 
 Portugal is a very small patch on it, and yet if it 
 had not been for Portugal being just where it is, 
 and if there had not been such a man as Sir Arthur 
 Wellesley ready to turn its geographical advantages 
 to the best possible use, Napoleon would very 
 probably have ended his career on a throne, instead 
 of on that lonely island in the Atlantic. 
 
 This is not the place for me to attempt to re- 
 describe the long glories of the Peninsular War. 
 In the first place, to do so would necessitate more 
 pages than I have paragraphs at my disposal ; and, 
 in the second place, are they not already painted 
 with a worthy splendour on the glowing pages of 
 Napier and Allison ? 
 
 But what does fall within the scope of such a 
 sketch as this is the business of pointing out a fact 
 which the school books say nothing about. The 
 work that Wellington did in the Peninsula was of
 
 240 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 two sorts. He not only saw the weak joint in 
 Napoleon's armour and struck hard and straight at 
 it. He did a great deal more than that. 
 
 The genius of his combinations, the tenacity of 
 his purpose, and that inspired confidence which 
 practically doubled the effectiveness of his fighting 
 force, compelled Napoleon to employ his greatest 
 generals, and some of his finest troops in the work 
 of " flinging the English into the sea," as he himself 
 phrased it. 
 
 "There is nothing," he told his marshals over 
 and over again, "there is nothing to be reckoned 
 with except the English." And it may be added 
 that if the English had not been led by such a 
 man as he who was now Viscount Wellington and 
 Baron Douro the reckoning might have been a 
 somewhat short one. 
 
 The actual effect of the Peninsular War and of 
 Wellington's genius is not to be seen so much in 
 the splendid triumphs of Vittoria and Salamanca, 
 or the awful slaughters of Albuera and Busaco. 
 It is to be found rather in the fact that Soult, 
 Ney, and Masse" na, the three finest marshals of the 
 Grand Army, were kept there, campaign after 
 campaign, fighting battle after battle, and suffering 
 defeat after defeat, in the hopeless effort to do 
 what it was absolutely necessary to be done if the 
 conquests of Napoleon were to be anything more 
 than a passing dream of empire. 
 
 Thus, for instance, when at the end of the
 
 WELLINGTON 241 
 
 campaign of 1810, Masse'na finally retired upon 
 Salamanca he had lost every fight in which he 
 had engaged, and the Grand Army was the poorer 
 by no fewer than thirty thousand men. We have 
 simply to ask ourselves what Napoleon would have 
 been able to do if he had only had all these men 
 free to work his will upon Continental troops and 
 win more triumphs like Austerlitz and Jena, instead 
 of being forced to send them battalion after battalion, 
 and army after army, to dash themselves to pieces 
 against that unbreakable phalanx of British valour 
 and determination which the genius of Wellington 
 had drawn up across the Portuguese frontier. 
 
 Magnificent as were the efforts he made, and 
 tremendous as were the sacrifices which France 
 submitted to for his sake, all the genius even of 
 Napoleon was of no avail as long as the life-blood 
 of the Napoleonic system was draining away 
 through that open wound in the Peninsula. But 
 for this there would have been no Leipsic, and 
 probably no Moscow, no Waterloo, and no St. 
 Helena. 
 
 The most splendid military triumph in the history 
 of the world is the uninterrupted march of victory 
 made by Wellington and the soldiers whom his 
 genius had made unconquerable for more than a 
 thousand miles from the lines of Torres Vedras 
 to the banks of the Seine. But behind the 
 brilliance of this incomparable triumph there is 
 something better still, something which Napoleon
 
 242 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 himself was first to see, and this was the supreme 
 genius which planned, and the untirable pertinacity 
 which carried out, without one hitch or fault from 
 start to finish, that marvellous series of operations 
 which began with the first move of the pawns at 
 Rolica, and ended with the triumphant checkmate 
 at Waterloo. 
 
 Although, as I say, it would be quite out of the 
 question to attempt to draw even the briefest out- 
 line of these magnificent campaigns, yet there are 
 one or two incidents in them which may be looked 
 at in passing for the sake of the glimpses they 
 afford of the man in the midst of his work, and, 
 few though they may be, there is yet more 
 real knowledge to be got from them than from 
 many pages of descriptions of battles and 
 sieges. 
 
 Thus, for instance, shortly after he landed for 
 the second time in Portugal there was a conspiracy 
 among the French officers to depose Marshal Soult, 
 and one of these men came to Wellington across 
 the Douro to tell him of this so that he might make 
 their work easier by a crushing defeat. This might 
 have been of enormous advantage to him, but he 
 refused point blank to avail himself of such base 
 assistance, and sent the traitor back to the master 
 whom he had betrayed. He was not the man to 
 work by methods like this. He had his own 
 methods, and so effectual were they that ten days 
 after he had landed at Lisbon there was not a
 
 WELLINGTON 243 
 
 single French soldier on Portuguese soil who was 
 not a prisoner of war. 
 
 A month afterwards Napoleon writing to Soult 
 and Ney said : " You are to advance on the English, 
 pursue them without cessation, beat them and fling 
 them into the sea. The English alone are re- 
 doubtable they alone. If the army is not differently 
 managed, before the lapse of a few months they will 
 bring upon it a catastrophe." How prophetic these 
 words were a glance at the splendidly incribed 
 colours of the British Peninsular Regiments will 
 amply suffice to show. 
 
 As usual, Wellington in the Peninsula, like 
 Nelson in the Mediterranean, was forced by the 
 incompetence or imbecility of the authorities at 
 home to do his tremendous work with most in- 
 adequate means. In Spain the people whom he 
 had come to save refused his soldiers food, and 
 those at home, whom he was no less fighting to 
 save, refused him money enough to buy it. In a 
 letter written in January, 1811, he put the position 
 very plainly. 
 
 "If we cannot persevere in carrying on the 
 contest in the Peninsula or elsewhere on the 
 Continent we must prepare to make one of our own 
 islands the seat of war. I am equally certain that 
 if Buonaparte cannot root us out of this country he 
 must alter his system in Europe and give us such 
 a peace as we ought to accept." 
 
 This was the work that he had to do and did,
 
 and here is a glimpse of the means he had to do 
 it with. " I have not," he says in the same letter, 
 "authority to give a shilling or a stand of arms 
 or a round of ammunition to anybody. I do give 
 all, it is true, but it is contrary to my instructions 
 and at my peril. Not another officer in the army 
 would even look at the risks that I have to incur 
 every day." There are not many more eloquent 
 pictures than this of a man serving his country 
 and saving it in spite of itself. 
 
 Like all good generals, Wellington insisted upon 
 absolute obedience, and nothing could excuse in his 
 eyes even the most splendid breach of discipline. 
 After the taking of Ciudad Rodrigo, General Craw- 
 ford, the leader of the famous Light Division, had 
 been ordered not to push his operations beyond the 
 river Coa, but he forgot his instructions in the 
 temptation to make a splendid dash at an over- 
 whelming force under Ney. 
 
 Nothing but the magnificent valour and discipline 
 of the Division saved it from utter destruction. 
 Still it was saved, and when its gallant leader 
 reported himself to Wellington he said: "I am 
 glad to see you safe, Crawford." 
 
 " Oh, we were in no danger I can assure you ! " 
 was the answer. 
 
 " No, but I was through your conduct ! " came 
 the dry retort, and Crawford walked away crest- 
 fallen, remarking to himself that the General was 
 " damned crusty to-day."
 
 WELLINGTON 245 
 
 Wellington's best known title is the Iron Duke, 
 and yet no man ever had less iron in him than 
 he. It is true that he armed himself from head 
 to foot with a mail which his enemies found impene- 
 trable, but the gallant heart whose high courage 
 carried him through so many dangers and difficulties 
 was withal as tender as a woman's. 
 
 When his last great fight had been fought and 
 won, when the long tragedy of the Napoleonic wars 
 was over, and the curtain had just fallen upon the 
 tremendous climax of Waterloo, Dr. Hume, his 
 physician, went to see him early on the morning 
 of the 1 9th of June to tell him of the death during 
 the night of his friend Gordon, and this is how 
 he described the conqueror on the morrow of his 
 greatest victory. 
 
 "He had, as usual, taken off his clothes, but had 
 not washed himself. As I entered he sat up in bed, 
 his face covered with the dust and sweat of the 
 previous day, and extended his hand to me which I 
 took and held in mine while I told him of Gordon's 
 death and of such of the casualties as had come 
 to my knowledge. He was much affected. I felt 
 the tears dropping fast upon my hand, and, looking 
 towards him, saw them chasing one another in fur- 
 rows over his dusty cheeks." 
 
 This is a touching little picture of the one man in 
 the world who has proved himself capable of grap- 
 pling with and overthrowing the Corsican Colossus, 
 and with it we may here bid him farewell. Waterloo
 
 246 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 was the last as well as the greatest of his fights. 
 He had given the world peace. He had overthrown 
 the most grievous tyranny that had threatened it for 
 many a long century. 
 
 He had found Europe under the heel of France. 
 He had conquered her conqueror ; and yet it was he 
 who, when terms of peace were being dictated in 
 Paris, stopped his ferocious old ally Bliicher from 
 blowing up the Bridge of Jena, and got such con- 
 cessions for France in the hour of her defeat and 
 humiliation as none but the victor of the Peninsula 
 and the hero of Waterloo could have done. Like 
 all really strong men, he was merciful in his 
 strength ; and like all really great soldiers he looked 
 upon his enemies as his friends as soon as he had 
 soundly thrashed them. 
 
 With his after career as a politician and a states- 
 man I have here nothing to do. His empire- 
 making ended with the order that sent the whole 
 steadfast British line streaming down from the 
 rising ground which they had held so stubbornly 
 all through that famous day. It is better to take 
 leave of him here, for Arthur Wellesley was too 
 good and too great a man for politics. He was 
 the idol of the army he had created, but he didn't 
 know how to lead a mob. 
 
 Seventeen years after Waterloo, to the very 
 day, he was beset in London streets by a howl- 
 ing multitude of the very people he had served 
 so splendidly.
 
 THE ORDER THAT SENT THE BRITISH LINE STREAMING DOWN FROM 
 THE RISING GROUND. 
 
 (.PaSf 246.)
 
 WELLINGTON 247 
 
 If he had not found a refuge in the Temple and a 
 bodyguard of Benchers, it is probable that they 
 would have pulled him from his horse and torn him 
 limb from limb. It is a sorry spectacle, although 
 relieved by the quaintness of the vision of this 
 unconquered hero of a hundred fights trusting 
 for his life to a bodyguard of lawyers. 
 
 He never forgot this, and probably never forgave 
 it. Every one knows how, when Apsley House was 
 threatened by a mob, he made ready to defend 
 it in a businesslike and soldierly way. When the 
 mob broke his windows he coolly ordered iron 
 shutters and put them up. Afterwards, when the 
 fickle tide of popular fancy had turned the other 
 way, and the mob was wont to cheer instead of 
 cursing him, he used to point to these shutters 
 and laugh good-humouredly but seriously withal. 
 
 In one sense, however, it is hardly true that 
 Wellington's last fight was at Waterloo. The 
 last time that he really made a display of his 
 military capacity was in London. It was he who 
 on the loth of April, 1848, saved London from 
 the Chartists. He never allowed a soldier to be 
 seen, much less a weapon, and when it was all 
 over, Sir John Campbell came to him and said : 
 
 "Well, Duke, it all turned out as you foretold." 
 
 And this was the answer : 
 
 " Oh, yes ; I was sure of it, and I never showed 
 a soldier or a musket, but I was ready. I could 
 have stopped them whenever you liked, and if
 
 248 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 they had been armed it would have been all the 
 same." 
 
 That was Wellington's last victory bloodless, 
 and, therefore, since the enemy would have been 
 his own countrymen, all the more glorious for that. 
 
 In the article on Nelson, I mentioned the well- 
 known fact that the greatest soldier and the greatest 
 sailor of their age met but once, and that Wellington 
 so far gauged the character of the hero of Trafalgar 
 as to describe him as " a very superior person." In 
 the spirit they not only met again, but they will live 
 together in everlasting honour in the memory of the 
 British people. 
 
 Their last resting-places are side by side, as they 
 should be, in St. Paul's Cathedral, and side by side 
 their glorious memories will remain as long as the 
 noble qualities which made them the greatest men, 
 not only of their nation, but of the age which their 
 great deeds made splendid, are held in honour and 
 that is the same thing as saying as long as the 
 human race endures.
 
 XI 
 
 "CHINESE GORDON" 
 
 "HONOUR NOT HONOURS"
 
 XI 
 "CHINESE GORDON" 
 
 WE are living rather too near to the days of 
 the man himself, to be able to say what 
 place History will ultimately assign to the greatest 
 and most famous of the old fighting stock of the 
 Gordons. Probably the discriminating historian of 
 the day after to-morrow will look upon him ethno- 
 logically as a queer survival or throwback a man 
 who lived and did his work in the nineteenth 
 century in the style of the fifteenth, or even the 
 fourteenth. 
 
 In the military sense he would seem to be the last 
 of our great soldiers of fortune for soldier of 
 fortune he undoubtedly was far more than soldier 
 of Britain and the work that he did as one of the 
 makers of the British Empire was done under 
 foreign flags. 
 
 It might, indeed, be asked by the superficial 
 observer in what sense he was an Empire-Maker at 
 all, or what right he has to claim a place in that long 
 and splendid array of great men, only a few of whom 
 
 251
 
 252 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 can be silhouetted within the limits of such a volume 
 as this and whose succession stretches through the 
 centuries from William, Duke of Normandy to Cecil 
 John Rhodes of Rhodesia. 
 
 The answer is plain enough, though not very 
 obvious at first sight. The British Empire is two- 
 fold. It is not only the greatest concrete Fact that 
 the world has ever seen ; it is also a vast and very 
 splendid Idea, and in this sense it covers, not only 
 just that portion of the earth's surface over which 
 the Union Jack flies, but also every other land 
 known and half-known, old and new, civilised and 
 savage, into which the genius of the Anglo-Saxon 
 has forced its way and over which it has exer- 
 cised that peculiar influence for which the word 
 " English " stands in the dictionaries of our foreign 
 competitors. 
 
 Charles George Gordon never added a square 
 yard to the British Empire, considered as a geo- 
 graphical expression. He very seldom fought at 
 the head of British troops, and when he did, it was 
 not to any very great purpose in fact his witnessing 
 of the murder of many hundreds of gallant British 
 soldiers by the officials who were guilty of the 
 criminal mismanagement of the Crimean War was 
 about the sum total of his experiences of warfare 
 under the Flag. 
 
 It is a not altogether curious fact that, although 
 Gordon was one of the very ablest leaders and 
 organisers of men, and although he, shortly after
 
 "CHINESE GORDON" 253 
 
 thirty, proved to demonstration that he possessed 
 most of the qualities of a great soldier, his native 
 country didn't appear to have any use for him, or 
 at least no adequate use. As I have said before, 
 the curse of both our Services, and therefore, in 
 a very definite and practical sense, of the whole 
 Empire, is officialism, or officialdom. 
 
 Two very different men grasped this fact in its 
 relation to Gordon. One was Nubar Pasha, Egyp- 
 tian Minister at Constantinople, and the other was 
 John Ruskin. Nubar said : " England owes little 
 to her officials ; she owes her greatness to men of 
 different stamp." Ruskin said practically the same 
 thing in one of his lectures at Woolwich, but in 
 different fashion and in many more words, while 
 Gordon, within a mile or so of the lecture-hall at 
 Woolwich, was bending his great soul to the routine 
 duties which appear to have been about the best 
 work that the British Government could find for 
 him to do. 
 
 When the British Government did at last get him 
 to take his share in the doing of the most difficult 
 and dangerous work which was just then necessary 
 to be done upon the very outskirts of civilisation, 
 those who were responsible for the exercise of the 
 executive power deserted him and left him to his 
 death by what is probably the basest and most 
 criminal betrayal of a man of deeds by men of 
 words that can be laid to the charge of a British 
 Government.
 
 254 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 History will probably say with truth that every 
 member of that fatally futile Cabinet who had any 
 hand in sending Gordon to Khartoum and neglect- 
 ing to give him reasonable support incurred a direct 
 and personal responsibility for his death, from 
 which the dispassionate verdict of Posterity will 
 be very slow to relieve their memories. 
 
 It is a stain that can never pass away from 
 their public reputations. There are other faults 
 of a similiar sort for which these men will be 
 arraigned at the bar of History, but the fate of* 
 the lonely, betrayed man, who day after day left 
 his starving and ever-diminishing garrison to look 
 out across the desert from the battlements of 
 Khartoum for the help which, for him, never 
 came, will certainly be considered the blackest if 
 not the greatest of them all. 
 
 But there is another and very practical sense in 
 which Gordon was a British Empire-Maker. This 
 realm of ours is what it is, not only because we 
 have fought for some parts of it and successfully 
 stolen others. It is ours because we knew how 
 to make use of it after we got it ; because of all 
 other men now existing on the face of the earth 
 the Anglo-Saxon is the best leader and governor 
 of savage and semi-savage men that has so far 
 been evolved, and of such leaders and governors 
 Gordon plainly proved himself to be one of the 
 very best. 
 
 Under the British flag he never won a battle for
 
 "CHINESE GORDON" 255 
 
 Britain. The genius which his Motherland might 
 have made such splendid use of did its best work 
 under the dragon-flag of China and the crescent- 
 flag of Egypt, but nevertheless on the day when 
 the last mile of the British high road from Cairo 
 to Cape Town is thrown open, and the Pax 
 Britannica is proclaimed from north to south of 
 Africa, men will remember Gordon and confess 
 that without him this might never have been 
 done. 
 
 It will have been noticed by those who have read 
 between the lines here printed that where Empire- 
 Makers are concerned the old-fashioned idea of 
 ancestry seems to be not altogether the fiction that 
 certain latter-day theorists, men of words to a man, 
 have sought to make it, and Gordon was no 
 exception to this rule. 
 
 His lineage stretches away back into the dim 
 mists which lie behind the history of all these 
 islands into the days when Englishmen, Scotsmen, 
 and Irishmen had yet to be thought of, and when 
 the divisions of mankind were racial rather than 
 national. 
 
 Of course the Gordons of last century were for 
 the most part desperate Jacobites, and as such were 
 hinderers rather than doers of the work of empire- 
 making. But, curiously enough, this particular 
 Gordon did not come from these. On the contrary, 
 there was a fight during that miserable business of 
 1 745 in which, on the field of Gladsmuir, a couple
 
 256 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 of thousand Highland clansmen played havoc with 
 some English regiments fresh back from the 
 Flemish wars, and after the slaughter they took 
 many prisoners, one of whom was David Gordon, 
 great-grandfather of the hero and martyr of Khar- 
 toum. 
 
 From this it will be seen that, whether by design 
 or accident, his branch of the ancient and wide- 
 spread stock had managed to get upon the right 
 side that is to say, the side which was to fight for 
 imperialism as distinguished from mere nationalism, 
 which in many cases is only another way of spelling 
 parochialism. 
 
 It is noteworthy, by the way, that Gordon's 
 grandfather, William Augustus, so named after 
 " Butcher Cumberland," fought at Louisburg and 
 on the Heights of Abraham, after Captain Cook 
 had taken those soundings on the St. Lawrence. 
 His son, William Henry, fought as an officer of 
 artillery at Maida, and it was his grandson who won 
 the yellow jacket and mandarin's button in suppress- 
 ing the Taiping rebellion, who refused a roomful of 
 gold as a bribe, and who, after carefully scratching 
 out the inscription, gave the huge gold medal 
 which he had received from the Emperor of China 
 anonymously to the Coventry Relief Fund. 
 
 This "give away your medal," to use his own 
 words, is the keynote of his whole life. Gordon 
 worked "for honour, not honours," and that one 
 letter makes a great deal of difference. We see
 
 "CHINESE GORDON" 257 
 
 here, toe, the sign of his kinship with other 
 Empire- Makers, the faculty of seeing what work 
 had to be done and the power of doing it for its 
 own sake, whatever difficulties there might lie in 
 the way. 
 
 As a boy he seemed to combine in the most 
 curious fashion a constitutional sensitiveness amount- 
 ing almost to timidity, with a contempt for personal 
 danger, and an equal contempt for authority which 
 individually he was unable to respect. 
 
 Altogether, in fact, his was a nature which had 
 very little to expect in the way of promotion or 
 favour from conventional officialdom, and it was very 
 little that he got. This view was no doubt amply 
 justified by his first experience in warfare in the 
 trenches before Sebastopol, for if ever heroism and 
 devotion abroad were crucified by authority at 
 home, this was the case during the Crimean 
 War. 
 
 From the Crimea the scene shifts somewhat 
 suddenly to China. And yet here we may note 
 that this is not the place to stop and worry about 
 the morality or otherwise of those so-called opium 
 wars which led up to the trouble of 1860. If the 
 opium trade was bad, the opening of the Flowery 
 Land to European commerce was good, and one 
 usually does find good and bad mixed up in the 
 most extraordinary manner in matters of this sort. 
 The point here is that the brief war which ended 
 with the taking of the Taku forts in the August of 
 
 18
 
 258 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 1860, and the capture of Pekin, was the beginning 
 of the career of " Chinese Gordon." 
 
 He did not see the taking of the forts, but he did 
 see the destruction of the Summer Palace, " the 
 Garden of Perpetual Brightness," which was 
 destroyed as an act of revenge at the order of a 
 British envoy who may here be left nameless in 
 the infamy that he earned by it. Gordon was one 
 of the involuntary Vandals, and this is what he said 
 about the business when writing home : 
 
 "You can scarcely imagine the beauty and 
 magnificence of the palaces we burnt. It made 
 one's heart sore to destroy them. It was wretchedly 
 demoralising work." 
 
 After this for a year and a half he fulfilled the 
 duties of a Captain of Engineers in the camp at 
 Tien-Tsin in the midst of a vast dreary plain. 
 During this time the Taiping rebels had been 
 industriously employing fire and sword to make one 
 of the most fertile portions of the Flowery Land 
 the reverse of worthy of the name and, at length 
 Shanghai itself, the headquarters of the foreign 
 traders, was threatened by the ever-advancing wave 
 of barbarism. 
 
 A defensive force was hurriedly raised by an 
 American named Ward, who for nearly two years 
 led it to constant victory and earned for it the 
 somewhat magniloquent title of the Ever- Victorious 
 Army. 
 
 Then a chance bullet killed Ward at the begin-
 
 "CHINESE GORDON" 259 
 
 ning of what might have been a most brilliant 
 career. Under his successor everything went 
 wrong. Victory was replaced by defeat and success 
 by disaster. This incompetent person being re- 
 moved, the hitherto obscure officer of Engineers 
 stepped into his place. It was a time when a 
 leader of men was badly wanted. It was also the 
 moment when Fate knocked at the door of Charles 
 George Gordon and found him in. 
 
 Within a very short time disorganisation was 
 replaced by discipline, despair by confidence, and 
 the Ever- Victorious Army was once more made 
 worthy of its name. It was here that Gordon 
 really began his career as a soldier of fortune. 
 When he took command he told Li-Hung-Chang 
 that he would turn the rebels out of the score of 
 walled cities which they had captured and strength- 
 ened, and put the rebellion down within eighteen 
 months. As a matter of fact he did it in fifteen. 
 
 The story of the doing of this so clearly shows 
 the extraordinary capacity that Gordon possessed 
 for both the organisation and the execution of a 
 military campaign, as well as the faculty of inspiring 
 confidence in all sorts and conditions of men, that 
 it is simply amazing that the home authorities did 
 not immediately recognise the fact that he was 
 something a good deal more than they had hitherto 
 taken him for. This, however, it was to take them 
 some twenty years more to find out. 
 
 Still there was one incident at the close of the
 
 260 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 rebellion which might have shown even the official 
 mind very clearly what sort of man this Major of 
 Engineers was. The last incident of the war was 
 the surrender of the great lake-city of Soo-Chow, 
 and the Wangs, or chiefs of the rebels, laid down 
 their arms on a guarantee of safety and good treat- 
 ment. The Chinese way of acting up to this was 
 to chop the heads off the whole lot. Now Gordon 
 considered himself in a measure responsible for this 
 guarantee, and the way in which he marked his 
 sense of the breach of faith was characteristically 
 unique. 
 
 The brilliancy of his services was recognised by 
 a money gift of 10,000 taels (between three and 
 four thousand pounds of English money). Gordon 
 acknowledged it by writing on the back of the 
 Imperial letter : " Major Gordon regrets that, owing 
 to the circumstances which occurred since the 
 capture of Soo-Chow, he is unable to receive any 
 mark of his Majesty the Emperor's recognition." 
 
 If ever a sceptred monarch got the snub direct 
 the Son of Heaven must have got it then, although 
 the probability is that the 10,000 taels never found 
 their way back to the Imperial treasury. Gordon 
 also wanted to throw up the whole business, but 
 the rebellion suddenly broke out again in another 
 place, and so he went on with his work until it was 
 finally crushed, for he was not the sort of man 
 who liked to begin a thing and not get through 
 with it.
 
 "CHINESE GORDON" 261 
 
 His brilliant success in every single operation 
 that he conducted clearly proved, as I have said, 
 that in Gordon Britain possessed a true leader of 
 men and master of affairs ; in other words an 
 Empire-Maker of the first order. And yet she 
 first ignored and undervalued him, and then, as 
 David did with Uriah, put him in the forefront of 
 the battle and left him there to die. 
 
 For twenty years after we had wars in many 
 places in South and West Africa, in Egypt, 
 Abyssinia, and Afghanistan. In some we gained 
 credit and in some disgrace, but during all that 
 twenty years the leaden eye of officialdom never 
 seems to have fallen upon Gordon. The Chinamen 
 were quicker sighted. He was the first and 
 I believe the only " foreign devil " who was 
 endowed with the Yellow Jacket and made one 
 of the bodyguard of the Son of Heaven. 
 
 If he had chosen he might have made an 
 enormous fortune and risen to any dignity short of 
 the throne that the Flowery Land had to offer, but 
 as a matter of fact he left China poorer than he 
 went into it, bringing away with him only that big 
 gold medal which he afterwards gave anonymously 
 to charity. 
 
 And all this time he was, as one of his biographers 
 and a fellow soldier has truly said, " not only with- 
 out honour in his own country, but was regarded 
 by many of the mandarins and ruling classes of his 
 fellow countymen as a madman." The use of the
 
 262 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 word "mandarin" there will be understood if we 
 remember that his brother mandarins of China held 
 him in the highest honour. 
 
 He came back to England in 1865, and was 
 given the command of the Royal Engineers at 
 Gravesend, and there for six years he did the 
 routine work of a soldier, and in his spare time won 
 a reputation for missionary work of the unofficial 
 and unassuming sort which will live as long as his 
 fame as a soldier and leader of men. 
 
 Here in the interval between his two careers 
 we may take a glance at the physical man as he 
 was just about now. This is how his comrade Sir 
 William Butler describes him : "In figure Gordon, 
 at forty years of age, stood somewhat under middle 
 height, slight but strong, active, and muscular. A 
 profusion of thick, brown hair clustered above 
 a broad, open forehead. His features were regular, 
 his mouth firm, and his expression when silent had 
 a certain undertone of sadness which instantly 
 vanished when he spoke. 
 
 " But it was the clear, grey-blue eyes, and the 
 low, soft, and very distinct voice that left the most 
 lasting impression on the memory of the man who 
 had seen and spoken with Charles Gordon, and an 
 eye that seemed to have looked at great distances 
 and seen the load of life carried on men's shoulders, 
 and a voice that, like the clear chime of some 
 Flemish belfry, had in it fresh music to welcome 
 the newest hour, even though it had rung out the 
 note of many a vanished day."
 
 "CHINESE GORDON" 263 
 
 Such was, then, the outer aspect of the man who 
 at length went to Egypt at the invitation of Nubar 
 Pasha and the Khedive Ismael, to begin that work 
 which in the end cost one of the most valuable of 
 British lives, and made the delta and valley of the 
 Nile what they are to-day in everything but name 
 a British province. 
 
 In this sense Gordon was de facto an Empire- 
 Maker. The mendacious amenities of Diplomacy 
 may lisp out meaningless phrases about the 
 evacuation of Egypt, but the fact is that we have 
 re-created the land of the Pharaohs, we have 
 brought it from bankruptcy to prosperity, we have 
 released the fellah from the terror of the lash and 
 the servitude of forced labour. We have raised 
 a downtrodden peasantry to the position of self- 
 respecting citizens, and we have turned slaves into 
 soldiers. This was the work that Gordon began 
 for us, although we did not employ him to do it, 
 or recognise that he was doing it ; but, having 
 taken it over and carried it so far, it is hardly likely 
 that even British officialdom will commit such a 
 crime against civilisation as the surrender of the 
 almost completed task would now be. 
 
 Gordon went south from Cairo by way of Suakin 
 and Berber to Khartoum, taking with him the 
 somewhat curious title of Governor of the Equator 
 which of course meant the Equatorial Provinces 
 and a very distinct conception of a Central 
 African Dominion which the soldiers and statesmen
 
 264 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 of other generations will realise in due course, 
 provided always that the onward march of the 
 Anglo-Saxon is not turned aside or stopped by 
 faint-heartedness within or disaster without. 
 
 His headquarters or capital was a place called 
 Gondokoro, situate in the midst of a ghastly region 
 of river, lake, and swamp, sunbaked by day, and 
 miasma-haunted by night. He went up by steamer 
 from Khartoum and, some two hundred miles above 
 the city, he passed the island of Abba in the White 
 Nile, and in one of his letters home he wrote these 
 words which read somewhat weirdly in the lurid 
 light of the camp-fires which seven years later 
 closed round Khartoum : 
 
 " Last night, March 26th, we were going slowly 
 along in the moonlight and I was thinking of you 
 all and of the expeditions and Nubar and Co., when 
 all of a sudden from a large bush came peals of 
 laughter. I felt put out, but it turned out to be 
 birds, who laughed at us from the bushes for some 
 time in a very rude way. They are a species of 
 stork, and seemed in capital spirits and highly 
 amused at anybody thinking of going to Gondokoro 
 with the hope of doing anything." 
 
 But the laughing storks were not the only 
 inhabitants of the Island of Abba, for, in a cave 
 among its rocks, there was dwelling at that very 
 moment a certain Moslem monk, or dervish, named 
 Mohammed Achmet, who had already won some 
 reputation for sanctity among his fellow tribesmen.
 
 "CHINESE GORDON" 265 
 
 It would have been a most unwarrantable and, 
 for Gordon, quite an impossible thing to do, and 
 yet, so far is fact stranger than fiction, that the 
 whole history of about a quarter of a continent 
 would have been changed for the better, and the 
 march of civilisation and humanity in Northern 
 Africa would have been incalulably accelerated if 
 the Governor-General of the Equator had stopped 
 his boat just at that point, landed his men on the 
 island, routed the holy man out of his cave, and 
 either put a bullet through his head or drowned him 
 in the Nile ; for this recluse, then unknown beyond 
 the confines of his native desert, was destined seven 
 years later to be hailed by the Soudan tribesmen as 
 the Mahdi a word which to us means so much 
 disgrace and disaster as well as hard and tardily 
 won triumph that there is no need here to further 
 elaborate the coincidence. 
 
 It was not a pleasant land, this scene of Gordon's 
 first government. As he himself says of the 
 wilderness : " No one can conceive the utter misery 
 of these lands. Heat and mosquitoes day and 
 night all the year round." These are few words, 
 but I am able to say from personal experience that 
 to those who know what African heat and African 
 mosquitoes are they speak very eloquently. 
 
 Here, until October, 1876, Gordon lived and 
 worked and suffered, making maps, building forts, 
 enticing traders to come to him, teaching his 
 soldiers to work and to till the ground and raise
 
 266 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 crops instead of plundering the natives. One by 
 one his staff died about him, but still somehow the 
 work went on. 
 
 When he first arrived he wrote : " the only 
 possessions Egypt has in my province are two 
 forts, one here at Gondokoro and the other at 
 Fatiko. There are three hundred men in one and 
 two hundred in the other. You can't go out in 
 safety half a mile." 
 
 But towards the end of '76 the line of posts had 
 been pushed to DufHi, a place on the Nile only 
 three degrees north of the Equator itself. Lake 
 Albert Nyanza had been circumnavigated for the 
 first time by a steamboat and mapped out not by 
 Gordon himself, who declined 'the honour of first 
 steaming on its waters, but by an Italian lieutenant 
 of his, named Gessi, and his reason for doing this 
 was "to give a practical proof of what I think 
 regarding the inordinate praise which is given to an 
 explorer." 
 
 His idea was that those who did the hard work, 
 the getting up of stores and boats and other 
 impedimenta over rapids and across .deserts, were 
 the real men who deserved the honour. " But all 
 this would go for nothing in comparison with the 
 fact of going on the lake, which you may say is a 
 small affair when you have the boats ready for you " 
 from which certain much-boomed and belauded 
 explorers known to latter-day fame might well 
 learn wisdom as well as a little becoming modesty.
 
 CHINESE GORDON" 267 
 
 The farther south the bounds of Equatoria were 
 pushed the more dismal the country seems to have 
 become. He calls it " a dead, mournful spot, with 
 a heavy, damp dew penetrating everywhere. It is 
 as if the angel Azrael had spread his wings over 
 this land. You have little idea of the silence and 
 solitude. I am sure no one whom God did not 
 support could bear up. It is simply killing." 
 
 At length the three years of his miserable service 
 came to an end. In October he set his face north- 
 ward from Khartoum and ate his Christmas dinnei 
 in London. 
 
 It was in those days that Britain woke up to 
 some sense of her opportunities and responsibilities. 
 She had begun what was then called the " forward " 
 policy, and which to-day with wider vision and 
 sounder wisdom we call the Imperial policy. 
 
 Unhappily the fickle breath of popular favour 
 soon blew the other way for a space ; a halt was 
 called, then a retreat was sounded, and of course 
 with the inevitable result. The arms of Britain 
 were sullied by defeat, and her ancient honour 
 was stained by the breach of her plighted word 
 and the desertion of those who had trusted to her 
 faith. 
 
 This was the dark and disgraceful period which 
 lasted from the end of 1880 to the beginning of 
 1885. It began with the desertion of the heroic 
 British garrisons in the Transvaal and the ever- 
 lasting shame of Majuba Hill, and it ended with
 
 268 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 the political betrayal and the constructive murder 
 of Charles George Gordon. 
 
 It was on January 31, 1877, that Gordon went 
 back to Africa as Governor-General of the Soudan. 
 On May 5th he was installed at Khartoum ; on the 
 1 9th he left to strike his first blow against slavery ; 
 by June 7th he had crossed four hundred miles of 
 wilderness and passed the frontier of Dafour. 
 
 His movements during this time, amazing as they 
 are now to us, were absolutely paralysing to the 
 chiefs and officials of the country. To them a 
 Pasha of Egypt was a portly gentleman, never in a 
 hurry, never inclined to leniency or mercy, a staunch 
 upholder of the slave trade in its worst as well as 
 its best aspects, and possessing a very keen eye 
 indeed to the main chance. 
 
 But the quite phenomenal Pasha who now flits 
 across their astonished vision is a lean, yellow-faced 
 little man, clad in the gorgeous but dusty and 
 travel -stained uniform of a Marshal of Turkey, 
 mounted on a swift dromedary which out-distances 
 every other animal of the desert save the beast 
 ridden by the Arab sheikh who accompanies him. 
 The two fly from point to point with incredible 
 rapidity ; the words of the Pasha are sometimes 
 stern and sometimes mild, but always just and 
 always dead against slavery. There is no talk oi 
 what he wants for himself, but only of what he 
 wants done or left undone, because this or that is 
 right or wrong and what he wants he gets.
 
 "CHINESE GORDON" 269 
 
 The troops that came labouring after him were of 
 such miserable material that they deserved only to 
 be made slaves themselves, and such the Arabs 
 would speedily have made them but for this yellow- 
 faced, bright-eyed man, who set them one against 
 another, played off their jealousies and hatreds, and 
 generally out-manceuvred them with such consum- 
 mate and incomprehensible skill, striking at such 
 vast distances with such incredible rapidity, that in 
 four months a seemingly impossible feat had been 
 accomplished, and the rebellion of the slave-kings 
 put down. 
 
 And yet it was all hopeless. The slave trade 
 was too much for him, as it has so far been too 
 much for every one else. " I declare I see no 
 human way to stop it ! " he writes in one of his 
 letters. " When you have got the ink that has 
 soaked into blotting-paper out of it, then slavery 
 will cease in these lands." 
 
 In the November of 1877 there occurred an inci- 
 dent which was destined in after years to bear 
 terrible fruit. He travelled from Kordofan via 
 Khartoum to Merawy. He was on his way to 
 Wadi Haifa to see about pushing on the railway 
 from there to Dongola. But before he got there a 
 dispatch reached him saying that the Abyssinians 
 had invaded the Eastern Soudan. Back he went, 
 post-haste, only to find the news was false. 
 
 If it had not been for this the railway would have 
 been completed, and the cataracts of the Nile would
 
 2;o MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 not have delayed the tardily-sent Relief Expedition 
 until the Arab bullets had done their work and 
 gallant Gordon's busy head had rolled to the foot 
 of the Mahdi's throne. 
 
 A few weeks after this he is once more in Cairo 
 in obedience to an urgent summons from the 
 Khedive. The work was this time financial. The 
 grip of the foreign bondholder was closing round 
 the throat of the fellaheen, and the bill for official 
 extravagance and incompetence had to be paid. It 
 was characteristic of Gordon that his first financial 
 reform was the cutting down of his own salary from 
 six thousand to three thousand a year. 
 
 This was all very well, but when he proposed to 
 apply the same methods to other people's salaries 
 he was very soon given to understand that he was 
 not the kind of man who was wanted in Cairo just 
 then, so he promptly threw up his presidency of the 
 Committee of Inquiry and went back to two years' 
 more work in the Soudan, to fight the slave trade 
 again in the old heroic, hopeless fashion, and to 
 make maps and plans ; to fly hither and thither over 
 the ghastly, waterless country, sometimes riding for 
 as much as two months at a time, till at last the 
 replacement of his old friend Ismael by Tewfik 
 Pasha once more called him back to Cairo. 
 
 This time he went to Abyssinia also, and got 
 arrested twice, a circumstance which enabled him to 
 give us the following word picture of King Johannes. 
 " He is of the strictest sect of the Pharisees. He
 
 "CHINESE GORDON" 271 
 
 talks like the Old Testament. Drunk overnight, 
 he is up at dawn reading the psalms. If he were 
 in England he would never miss a prayer-meet- 
 ing, and would have a Bible as big as a port- 
 manteau." 
 
 After his release he came home again to rest, as 
 he thought, but as a fact to be called after a few 
 weeks' run on the Continent to take the command 
 of the Colonial Forces at the Cape of Good 
 Hope. 
 
 It was the eve of the Transvaal War, and now 
 Gordon made the first and the greatest mistake of 
 his life. He refused the command. If he had 
 taken it there might have been no Transvaal War ; 
 certainly there would have been no Ingogo or 
 Majuba Hill. He started instead to India to be 
 Secretary to Lord Ripon, the new Liberal Viceroy. 
 
 Three days after he landed he threw up his 
 appointment, and two days later he received an 
 urgent invitation from China. He asked for leave, 
 and the War Office refused. He threw up his 
 commission, making a present of its value, about 
 .6,000, to his stupid and graceless masters. 
 
 He stopped the war with Russia, and sped back 
 again to London, receiving a telegram on the way 
 telling him that his leave had been cancelled and 
 his resignation refused. 
 
 He afterwards made a futile visit to Ireland and 
 an equally futile trip to South Africa. He offered 
 to go and help in settling the Basuto trouble. The
 
 272 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 Cape Government, to its loss and its shame, had 
 not even the politeness to reply to his offer, but 
 when two millions of money and a great number of 
 valuable lives had been lost, they asked him a year 
 later if he would renew his offer, and, like the 
 generous and single-hearted hero that he was, he 
 did so. 
 
 Unhappily, however, when he got on the scene 
 of action he spoilt everything by allowing the 
 enthusiast in him to get the better of the soldier 
 and the skilled man of affairs. The Cape Govern- 
 ment was certainly in the wrong as regards the 
 Basuto question. Gordon's advice to them was to 
 admit their wrong and begin to do right. Very 
 good indeed from the ethical point of view, but in 
 practice hopelessly wrong and bad where the South 
 African native is concerned. With him, as with 
 the Boers, to admit yourself in the wrong is to 
 own yourself defeated, and to invite instant aggres- 
 sion. 
 
 Of course the Cape Government could do nothing 
 of the sort. To have done so would have been to 
 have kindled the flames of native war over the 
 whole southern half of the Continent. This was 
 the fatal policy which had already lost us the 
 Transvaal when Sir Evelyn Wood had it in the 
 hollow of his hand. To have repeated it would 
 probably have been to lose all South Africa. 
 Gordon, in his usual fashion, threw up his appoint- 
 ment at once and came back to England. 
 
 o
 
 "CHINESE GORDON ' 273 
 
 It was now November, 1882. Naturally he was 
 coldly received at home, but his reception was 
 somewhat mollified by a letter which the King of 
 the Belgians sent him, for the second time asking 
 him to enter his service. 
 
 " For the moment," says his Majesty, " I have no 
 mission to offer you, but I wish to have you at my 
 disposal, and I wish to take you from this moment 
 as my counsellor. You can name your own terms. 
 You know the consideration I have for your great 
 qualities." 
 
 The post that he would probably have had was 
 the Governorship of the Congo. One can imagine 
 how in such a position he would have dealt with 
 an unhung blackguard like Lothaire, the mur- 
 derer of a man who had confided himself to his 
 hospitality. 
 
 He spent most of the following year in travel, 
 chiefly in Palestine. The Delta of Egypt had been 
 conquered, Mohammed Achmet, the carpenter's 
 son, had become Mahdi, and the Soudan revolt was 
 in full blast. Now at last the British Government 
 called upon the one man who, had his genius and 
 his work been recognised ten years sooner, could 
 have saved so much disgrace and disaster. 
 
 How utterly he had been neglected and how 
 completely he was unknown in his own country 
 even now, may be guessed from a remark made by 
 a gentleman to an officer of the Pembroke garrison. 
 
 " I see," said this person, "that the Government 
 
 19
 
 274 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 have just sent a Chinaman to the Soudan. What 
 can they mean by sending a native of that country 
 to such a place ? " \ 
 
 He thought, alas, that " Chinese Gordon " was 
 a yellow-faced Asiatic who wore a pigtail and yet, 
 after all, did British Officialdom know very much 
 more about the hero it was now sending to his 
 death ? 
 
 In Egypt all was panic. The army of Hicks 
 Pasha had been annihilated. All Gordon's work 
 was undone, and the Mahdi was practically master 
 of the Soudan. But meanwhile Gordon had de- 
 cided to accept the King of the Belgians' offer. 
 On New Year's Day, 1884, he reached Brussels 
 to tell him so, and the same day he learnt that 
 the British Government would not let him go. 
 His thoroughly justified answer was a request to 
 be allowed to retire from Her Majesty's service, 
 "without any claim whatever for pension"- King 
 Leopold, with a juster estimate of the man's value, 
 having promised to make up the loss to him. The 
 refusal was withdrawn, and he prepared to start for 
 the Congo. 
 
 Then on the i7th of January there came that 
 memorable telegram from Lord Wolseley asking 
 him to come to London. He knew what he was 
 wanted for and he went. The work was the paci- 
 fication and then the evacuation of the Soudan. 
 
 By the i8th of February he was in Khartoum 
 again. His old influence at once reasserted itself.
 
 THE LONELY MAN WHO STOOD ON THE RAMPARTS 
 OF KHARTOUM. 
 
 (Pag.e 275.)
 
 "CHINESE GORDON" 275 
 
 What followed is too recent and too well known for 
 detailed repetition here : the vacillation between 
 war and peace, between diplomacy and force, argu- 
 ment when there should have been hard-hitting, 
 and hard-hitting when there should have been 
 argument. 
 
 The net result was only fully known to the 
 lonely man who month after month stood on the 
 ramparts of Khartoum, beleaguered by the Mahdi's 
 innumerable hosts, looking out over the desert and 
 down the Nile for the army of relief which ought 
 even then to have been there, and which was wait- 
 ing for politicians to finish their wrangles before it 
 even started. 
 
 Then, week after week, the weary working and 
 waiting went on, the ring of spears drawing ever 
 closer and closer round the doomed city, the pro- 
 visions within rapidly dwindling, and the lonely 
 soldier, the last of his blood now left in Khartoum, 
 was still looking vainly northward. 
 
 So Monday morning, the 26th of January, came, 
 and in the dim light that comes before the dawn 
 the Arabs made their last and successful assault. 
 The moon had set at one o'clock. The famished 
 garrison made but little resistance. Gordon at the 
 head of about a score of men faced the incoming 
 victors near the church of the Austrian mission. 
 
 The eastern sky was just reddening with the 
 coming dawn when a stream of Arabs, shouting for 
 Islam and victory, rushed into the open space that
 
 276 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 had been made round the church. They stopped 
 and put up their rifles. An irregular volley crackled 
 along their line, and when the smoke had drifted 
 away there was nothing for the belated expedition 
 to do but avenge the death of the betrayed and 
 deserted hero. 
 
 It was about midday on the 28th when a couple 
 of steamers, with Sir Charles Wilson and a detach- 
 ment of the Sussex Regiment on board, steamed 
 out on to the broad stretch of river above which 
 Khartoum stands at the junction of the Blue and 
 White Nile. Half-an-hour told the miserable truth. 
 There was no flag flying from the battlements, and 
 no English voice to bid the tardy comers wel- 
 come. 
 
 But there is to be a welcome of a sort, for, as 
 the boats come within range, the guns of Khartoum 
 open fire on them and a spattering hail of rifle-balls 
 drop about them, and the puffs of smoke leap up 
 from every point along the banks till the circle 
 round the boats is completed. Of this there could 
 be only one meaning : Gordon the deserted was 
 dead. And this meaning was true, though we did 
 not know the full truth of it until long after all that 
 was left of him on earth had been scattered, grave- 
 less and uncared for, over the wind-swept sands of 
 the Soudan. 
 
 There is his grave ; there, too, now is his monu- 
 ment the memory of the work he did and the 
 deathless fame he earned. On those who sent
 
 "CHINESE GORDON" 277 
 
 him to the forefront of the battle and left him 
 there to die History has not yet given her verdict. 
 When she does it will, as usual, be a just one, and, 
 in all probability, it will not form very pleasant 
 reading for those of their descendants who may be 
 animated with anything like a proper pride of 
 ancestry.
 
 XII 
 
 CECIL RHODES 
 
 "ALL ENGLISH THAT 'S MY DREAM 7"
 
 XII 
 CECIL RHODES 
 
 A LTHOUGH there are obvious difficulties in 
 xV the way of writing at once without fear and 
 without favour of a man who is unquestionably one 
 of the great ones of the earth while he is still alive, 
 there are yet two very cogent reasons why Cecil 
 Rhodes should be the subject of this concluding 
 essay. 
 
 In the first place, he is the last of our Empire- 
 Makers in order of time, and, in the second place, 
 he has done his empire-making in the last region 
 of the earth in which this empire, or any other, can 
 be extended without coming into direct armed con- 
 flict with the great Powers of the earth. 
 
 If you get a map of Africa published thirty years 
 ago, and lay it beside a quite recent one, a very 
 little intelligent observation will enable you to see, 
 at any rate, what I may be allowed to call prima 
 facie evidence of the magnificent work which this 
 last of our Empire-Makers has done, not so much 
 
 281
 
 282 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 for this generation, perhaps, as for the next, and 
 the next. 
 
 It is all very well for the goose that has never 
 seen over its own farmyard wall to assume a lofty, 
 and possibly sincere, contempt for the vast stretches 
 of prairie and forest land that may lie outside. He 
 is quite justified in saying to his brother geese : 
 " This is our home ; all our wants are supplied here. 
 What do we want to go and lose ourselves for in 
 the long grass, or expose ourselves to the wild 
 animals that may be lurking about the dark depths 
 of the forest? This farmyard where we have 
 lived all our lives, and where our long and honour- 
 able ancestry has lived before us, is surely enough 
 for us. There is a nice pond yonder fringed with 
 succulent mud. It has nice worms and other things 
 in it, and there doesn't seem any prospect of our 
 general supply of goose-food coming to an end. 
 What do we care about what there is outside? 
 Why should we trouble ourselves about the fortunes 
 of silly birds who go and fly over the wall, and 
 lose themselves in the wilderness? Let them go. 
 What are they to us, even if they were born in the 
 same farmyard ? " 
 
 That is all very well as far as it goes, but there 
 comes a time when the farmyard fills up, and the 
 duck-pond becomes over-crowded, and worms and 
 goose-food, &c., have to be scrambled for, and 
 sometimes even fought for, and it is just here 
 that the larger wisdom of those who not only
 
 CECIL RHODES 283 
 
 look over, but fly over, the farmyard wall comes 
 in. 
 
 The fact is, that the known world is fast filling 
 up. It may be that Nature is preparing some 
 colossal cataclysm for the destruction of this civili- 
 sation, just as she has done for the subversion of 
 others ; but, for the present, what those who have 
 looked over the farmyard wall have to consider is 
 the fact that vastly improved conditions of life in 
 the older countries of the world have, with the sole 
 and ominous exception of France, had their inevit- 
 able result in a vast increase of population, and 
 that meanwhile, for the last three hundred years or 
 so, the available portions of the world have been 
 getting discovered, and filled up according to their 
 capacity of sustenance. 
 
 It is not, therefore, a merely predatory instinct, 
 or a felonious desire to go and steal away from 
 the gentle savage those lands which he is mostly 
 accustomed to use as battlefields, that sends out 
 the pioneer to the uttermost ends of the earth. It 
 is that ineradicable instinct planted deep in all 
 healthy human nature to get elbow-room, and behind 
 this instinct there is the necessity which Providence 
 provided against when it gave us this instinct, and 
 that is the necessity of getting out of a place that 
 is overcrowded, into some other where muscles and 
 brains can get a better chance. 
 
 It is probable, too, that that widespread passion 
 which we are accustomed to call "land-hunger" has
 
 284 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 been given to us in order to compel us to carry out 
 the vast scheme of human progress under the im- 
 pression that we are benefiting ourselves. 
 
 Of course, as a rule, we do benefit ourselves, but 
 it is reserved for the few to see that greater Pur- 
 pose which we are fulfilling at the same time that 
 we are serving ourselves, and of all the men who 
 ever lived no one has seen this more clearly than 
 Cecil Rhodes. Accident and weak lungs took him 
 to Africa that is to say to the only continent in 
 which it is yet possible for the British Empire to 
 be increased without violating the territory of some 
 already established and recognised Power, more or 
 less civilised. 
 
 Like Nelson and Warren Hastings, he came of 
 a clerical stock. If it had not been for those weak 
 lungs of his it is possible that he might have passed 
 through a distinguished career at Oxford, and either 
 entered the church, or gone into business probably 
 the latter but in either case the map of South 
 Africa would have looked very different to what it 
 does to-day. 
 
 In one respect he presents a very strong and 
 striking contrast to our other Empire-Makers. 
 Francis Drake went on his filibustering expedi- 
 tions, looted plate-ships, and sacked towns, no 
 doubt with a worthy intention of hurting the 
 Queen's enemies, but also with a very definite idea 
 of making money. John Hawkins started the 
 Slave Trade for the same reason ; so too that
 
 CECIL RHODES 285 
 
 East India Company which made it possible for 
 Clive and Warren Hastings to do their work, was 
 in its beginnings a money-making concern, and 
 little else. It will be remembered, for instance, 
 how Warren Hastings was grievously hampered 
 in his empire-making by the incessant demands 
 of his directors for money. 
 
 Now the distinctive fact of Cecil Rhodes's career 
 is that he started the other way. The first solid 
 and salient fact that he appears to have grasped in 
 those old days in the early seventies, when he used 
 to sit under the burning African sun at a rough 
 deal table picking diamonds out from the yellow 
 earth as it was brought by his kaffirs from the old 
 Kimberley mine, was the transcendent and almost 
 irresistible power of money. 
 
 In Drake's day valour and endurance were used 
 to earn money in the first case, or, if the reader 
 prefers it, to steal money or its equivalent. This 
 was well enough in its way, and the British Empire 
 would have got on rather badly without it, but 
 Cecil Rhodes appears to have had an inspiration on 
 this subject of the sort which only comes to men 
 of real genius. He seems to have said to himself: 
 "How would it be to earn the money first in 
 thousands, in hundreds of thousands, in millions if 
 possible, and then use it to employ in more legiti- 
 mate work the same valour and enthusiasm which 
 are just as conspicuous British qualities now as 
 they were in the days of Queen Elizabeth ? "
 
 286 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 It is quite possible that, being an Oxford under- 
 graduate, he remembered the famous aphorism of 
 Horace : " Honestly if possible but still make it." 
 There may have been some of his transactions 
 which if submitted to the legal scrutiny, say, of 
 the Lord Chief Justice, would possibly move him 
 to another exhibition of that "unctuous rectitude" 
 such as that with which he, the sometime forensic 
 defender of traitors and sedition-mongers, out- 
 poured on Dr. Jameson and his comrades. 
 
 I have heard stories of the sort myself in Kim- 
 berley and elsewhere in South Africa, but what of 
 that? There are a good many things in our 
 history that it would be difficult to defend on moral 
 grounds, and yet without them we should have 
 little or no history at all. 
 
 There are several of Cecil Rhodes's own sayings 
 on record which show clearly the light in which he 
 looked upon large quantities of money not merely 
 as money, not as vulgar riches, but as an indis- 
 pensable means to an exalted end. 
 
 He was with Gordon in that sadly futile ex- 
 pedition of his to Basutoland, and during one of 
 their conversations Gordon told him how he had 
 been offered a roomful of gold as a reward for 
 his services in China. 
 
 "And you mean to say you didn't take it?" 
 said Rhodes, possibly with some doubt of the 
 great Crusader's sanity in his mind. 
 
 "No, I didn't," said Gordon. "I didn't feel
 
 CECIL RHODES 287 
 
 altogether justified in doing so. I had been paid 
 already for what I'd done." 
 
 " I should have taken it, and as many more 
 roomfuls as they would have given me," said 
 Rhodes, without hesitation. " Just think how much 
 more you could have done with it. It's no use for 
 us to have big ideas if we have not got the money 
 to carry them out." 
 
 That was Cecil Rhodes. He didn't say : " Think 
 how much it would have come to," or " How rich 
 a man it would have made you," or even "What 
 you would have been able to buy with it," but 
 "What you could do with it." Those who call 
 Cecil Rhodes a money-grabber, a financial schemer, 
 and all the rest of it, might learn something from 
 that conversation were they not as they are. 
 
 There is no doubt but that he first of all devoted 
 himself body and soul to the making of money, 
 and yet in the meanwhile he must have been 
 slowly shaping this Ideal of his. Early in the 
 eighties he was talking about South Africa 
 generally with a friend, and during the course of 
 the conversation he pointed to the map and said : 
 " There ! All English ! That's my dream." 
 And all English it would have been if it had not 
 been for the stupidity, the ignorance, and the 
 cowardice of the vote-hunters in Downing Street, 
 who were afraid to be worried with the cares, 
 though they had no objection to avail themselves 
 of the honours and profits of empire-making.
 
 288 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 It is a favourite theory of my own that no man 
 ought to be allowed to sit either in the House of 
 Lords or the House of Commons unless he has 
 been at least once round the world and visited the 
 greater part of the British Empire. 
 
 If this had been the rule during the present 
 reign, I am perfectly certain that, whether by 
 purchase, conquest, or colonisation, the whole of 
 Africa from the Zambesi to the Cape would now 
 be coloured red, and there would probably have 
 been a red streak stretching from Cairo via 
 Khartoum to the shores of Lake Tanganyka. 
 
 In one of his speeches, Cecil Rhodes aptly des- 
 cribed South Africa as the Cinderella of the British 
 Colonies, and this is perfectly true. There is 
 hardly a single instance in which Downing Street 
 has not tried to lose what every one now recognises 
 as of almost priceless importance. 
 
 Thus, for instance, in 1872 Lord Kimberley 
 might have bought Delagoa Bay, "the keyhole 
 of Africa," for the paltry amount of twelve or 
 fifteen thousand pounds and he refused the bar- 
 gain. It would be cheap now at ten millions. 
 Unfortunately, as his biographer aptly puts it, there 
 was no Cecil Rhodes then to find the money out 
 of his own pocket. He was still sitting on a bucket 
 and sorting diamonds in Kimberley. 
 
 Again, in 1875, tne Cape Colonial Government 
 strongly urged the annexation of Walfisch Bay 
 and Damaraland on the south-west coast. The
 
 CECIL RHODES 289 
 
 reply of Downing Street was : " Her Majesty can 
 give no encouragement to schemes for the retention 
 of British jurisdiction over Great Namaqualand 
 and Damaraland." 
 
 This, by the way, is a somewhat important point 
 to those who wish to get a clear view of Cecil 
 Rhodes's work as an Empire- Maker in South Africa. 
 Twenty-two years ago Ernst von Weber, who had 
 been prospecting, as it were, for a German South 
 African Empire, said : " What would not such a 
 country full of such inexhaustible natural treasures 
 become if in course of time it is filled with German 
 emigrants ! Besides all its own natural and sub- 
 terraneous treasures, the Transvaal offers to the 
 European Power which possesses it an easy access 
 to the immensely rich tracts of country which lie 
 between the Limpopo and the Central African lakes 
 and the Congo." 
 
 In 1884 Prince Bismarck said before a committee 
 of the Reichstag : " No opposition is apprehended 
 from the British Government, and the machinations 
 of the Colonial authorities must be prevented." 
 
 Now look at any modern map of South Africa. 
 Damaraland is now German territory, the Transvaal 
 has been given back to the corrupt and tyrannical 
 government which has of late made itself a libel 
 on the name of civilisation. A German railway 
 runs from Pretoria to Delagoa Bay, the only road 
 from the sea to the Transvaal which does not pass 
 through British territory. There is a regular line 
 
 20
 
 290 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 of German steamers to Delagoa Bay, and through 
 this channel have come in the German officers who 
 have drilled the Transvaal army and built the forts 
 which command Johannesburg and Pretoria, as well 
 as the field-pieces and machine-guns, the thousands 
 of rifles and the millions of cartridges, which have 
 no other purpose than the oppression of British 
 subjects and the slaughter of British soldiers as 
 soon as the psychological moment arrives. 
 
 This much for the present has been lost, and un- 
 happily no one has been hung for the losing of it. 
 Some day it will have to be taken back, probably 
 at a frightful loss of life and an enormous ex- 
 penditure of money. 
 
 But there is one bright spot in the picture. 
 Between the German territory of Damaraland and 
 the western frontier of the Transvaal and the Free 
 State there is a broad stretch of red. It was only 
 painted red just in the nick of time, and it was Cecil 
 Rhodes who painted it. 
 
 Another glance at the map will convince you in 
 a moment what would have happened if he had 
 not made Bechuanaland British. To the east 
 there is the ignoraritly hostile Transvaal. Behind 
 that and stretching far away to the northward is 
 the Portuguese territory of Mozambique. Farther 
 north are the southern confines of the Soudan, and 
 the enormous virgin lands of Central Africa. To 
 the west is German West Africa. Hence, but for 
 that red strip, there would be no way either by sea
 
 CECIL RHODES 291 
 
 or land through British territory that is to say, 
 through no territory that would not be hostile to 
 the Central African Empire of the future, most of 
 which is, thanks to Cecil Rhodes, already called 
 Rhodesia. 
 
 People who only read the English papers, some 
 of which would appear, like the Pretoria Press and 
 the Standard and Diggers News, to be in the pay of 
 Mr. President Kriiger and his corrupt legislature, 
 have an idea, and a very natural one too, that the 
 great company known as the De Beers Con- 
 solidated Mines is just a money-making concern 
 and nothing else. There never was a greater 
 mistake. The De Beers Company is the creation 
 of Cecil Rhodes, and therefore it had to be an 
 empire-making concern one way or the other. 
 
 One night there was a conversation between 
 three men in Kimberley, which deserves to become 
 historical. The three men were Alfred Beit, 
 Barnie Isaacs Barnato, and Cecil John Rhodes. 
 Each of these three men had something that the 
 others wanted. Beit and Barnato don't seem to 
 have wanted much more than good business, but 
 Alfred Beit already knew Cecil Rhodes for some- 
 thing much greater and better than merely a 
 business man and piler-up of money-bags, so he 
 supported them. 
 
 What Rhodes wanted was nothing less than the 
 levying of a subsidy on the diamond mining in- 
 dustry of Kimberley, for the purpose of empire-
 
 292 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 making in the north. Barnie Barnato kicked at 
 this. In the end he gave way, as he always did 
 to Rhodes, and the result was that the De Beers 
 Corporation was virtually taxed to the extent of 
 half a million sterling for that northward expansion 
 which Cecil Rhodes made possible when he per- 
 suaded Sir Hercules Robinson to proclaim the 
 Bechuanaland Protectorate and checkmated the 
 Germans on the west and the Boers on the east 
 just as they were going to join hands across it. 
 
 What they really meant to do may be easily 
 inferred from Van Niekerk's raid into the so- 
 called Stella- Land which necessitated Sir Charles 
 Warren's expedition for which the Pretorian 
 Government still owes us about a million and a 
 half and Colonel Ferreira's attempted raid across 
 the Limpopo into Matabeleland which was only 
 stopped by Dr. Jameson's Maxims. 
 
 If it had not been for Cecil Rhodes and the De 
 Beers half million, the British flag would not now 
 be flying over a region as large as France and 
 Germany combined which, by all appearances, is 
 destined to be the nucleus of the South African 
 Empire of the day after to-morrow. 
 
 In such a vast country as South Africa how big 
 it is may be guessed from the comparison between 
 it and England on the map the first requisite for 
 advancing civilisation is a road, the next a telegraph, 
 and the next is a railway, and the absolute necessity 
 of these to the new domain that he was making for
 
 CECIL RHODES 293 
 
 Britain was of course plainly apparent to such a 
 man as Cecil Rhodes. 
 
 His dream, which, if he lives long enough, he 
 will certainly realise, is the making of that British 
 high road from Cairo to Cape Town which Gordon, 
 but for the baseness which betrayed him to his 
 death, would certainly now be helping to make 
 from the other end. Therefore when there was a 
 shortness of money for the making of the railway 
 to Mafeking, and for carrying the telegraph up 
 through Rhodesia and northward across the Zam- 
 besi, the deficiency was supplied out of the capacious 
 pockets of the man who, if he had only had the 
 chance, would have been so glad to give that 
 ; 1 2,000 for Delagoa Bay, and who knows Africa 
 well enough to see that with its rinderpest, its 
 locusts, and its horse-sickness, it stands in more 
 need of mechanical transit and communication than 
 any other part of the world. 
 
 When the extension of the Beira railway became 
 necessary Cecil Rhodes, by the sheer force of his 
 own character, persuaded Lord Rothschild to put 
 down ,25,000, every penny of which the great 
 financier believed was going to be " chucked into the 
 sea." His Lordship probably thinks differently now. 
 
 Perhaps the most salient feature in the con- 
 temporary history of South Africa is the silent 
 but ceaseless struggle for mastery which is going 
 on, and has been going on for years, between Cecil 
 Rhodes and Paul Kriiger.
 
 294 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 There are some people who say that there are 
 only two men in South Africa. In the political 
 sense this is probably true. So far, with the single 
 exception, perhaps, of the Jameson Raid and the 
 consequences which the weakness of our officials 
 abroad and the cowardice of our government at 
 home made so deplorable, the enlightened English- 
 man has scored at every move over the dishonest 
 cunning of the ignorant Dopper. 
 
 He prevented him joining hands with the 
 Germans across Bechuanaland, he stopped his raid 
 into Matabeleland, he got his raiders stopped on 
 the confines of Amatongaland and so destroyed 
 his cherished dream of a Transvaal seaboard 
 and, worse than all, he has made Rhodesia a 
 so much better place even for Dutchmen to live in 
 than the Transvaal, that the Boers are every day 
 treking through the drifts of the Limpopo to live 
 on British soil and under British rule that of Paul 
 Kriiger and his German and Hollander hangers-on 
 becoming impossible for self-respecting men to 
 submit to just as fast as their avarice and stupidity 
 can make it so. 
 
 Both these men have their dreams. Paul Kriiger 
 is not the sort of person whom any one would 
 associate with an ideal. Still he has got one. It 
 is a United States of South Africa, under what he 
 is pleased to consider republican rule. 
 
 He is probably too ignorant to know that, with 
 the possible exceptions of Russia and Turkey, there
 
 CECIL RHODES 295 
 
 never was a civilised or half-civilised Government 
 less like a republic than the corrupt and tyrannical 
 oligarchy of Pretoria, but that's what he means, 
 and it is to fight for that and not to fight for the 
 independence of the Transvaal, which he knows 
 perfectly well is secured by the Imperial Govern- 
 ment, that he has built his forts and imported his 
 German officers, German cannon, and German 
 rifles and ammunition. 
 
 Cecil Rhodes also has an ideal. It is a federation 
 of the South African states, crown colony, republic 
 and self-governing colony, each possessing the 
 management of its own affairs, and directing them 
 according to the will of the majority, and all united 
 under the aegis of the British flag, and enjoying 
 that equal freedom and security which cause 
 nineteen out of every twenty emigrants from 
 France and Germany to go and settle in British 
 colonies rather than in their own. 
 
 Which of the two ideals will be realised is not 
 very difficult to see. The one is artificial, unnatural, 
 and two hundred years behind the times. The 
 other is natural, logical, and if anything, a little 
 bit ahead of the times, and the difference between 
 them is not altogether unlike the difference between 
 Paul Kriiger and Cecil Rhodes. 
 
 It would, of course, be quite outside the range of 
 human possibility for a man to have attained to the 
 real greatness of Cecil Rhodes without having made 
 a good many enemies, public and private.
 
 296 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 Of his private enemies there is no need to say 
 very much. In the first place, until human nature 
 has changed very considerably, it would be quite 
 impossible for any man to have been so uniformly 
 and so brilliantly successful as Cecil Rhodes has 
 been without making plenty of enemies both 
 private and public. One of the very worst 
 methods of promoting brotherly love in the breasts 
 of men whose standard of manliness is not quite 
 up to the average is to out-distance them in the 
 race for political distinction, or to out-wit them 
 in the trickery of finance and I don't suppose 
 that any one would be readier to admit that, in 
 its ultimate analysis, finance is mainly trickery 
 than Cecil Rhodes himself. 
 
 This category would include practically all the 
 private and personal enemies of Cecil Rhodes 
 save one. The exception is, I regret to say, a 
 woman, and that is a fact which naturally blunts 
 the pen of criticism when it is held in the hands 
 of a man. There would be no need to men- 
 tion Mrs. Cronwright-Schreiner better known in 
 literary circles as Olive Schreiner here but for 
 the fact that she has made it impossible to pass 
 her over without notice by writing the most recent 
 and, I fear I must also say, the most virulent and 
 untruthful attack that has been made upon the 
 personal character and public policy of our South 
 African Empire-Maker. 
 
 And yet even this attack is in its way a sort of
 
 CECIL RHODES 297 
 
 testimonial to the greatness of the man whose 
 reputation it was intended to demolish, despite 
 the fact that in it Cecil Rhodes is depicted as a 
 monster of iniquity and as the head of a soulless 
 and tyrannical corporation which has not only been 
 guilty of all the crimes in the Decalogue, but has 
 invented a few new ones to go on with. Strange 
 to say, however, when Mrs. Cronwright-Schreiner 
 was once interrupted in one of her well-known 
 denunciations of the greatest Englishman of his day 
 with the remark that after all he was a great man, 
 she exclaimed: "A great man! Of course he is, 
 a very great man, and that's the pity of it ! " The 
 almost unanimous verdict of the English and South 
 African press on the deplorable literary and political 
 blunder which Mrs. Cronwright-Schreiner perpe- 
 trated in writing " Trooper Peter Halkett," goes 
 far to show that her personal estimate of her 
 enemy is a good deal more correct than her literary 
 and political estimate. 
 
 Of the public enemies of Cecil Rhodes it will 
 suffice to point out briefly that, without one 
 exception and whatever their nationality, they are 
 also the enemies of his country. It is noteworthy 
 too that Cecil Rhodes himself seems to have an 
 instinctive perception of real as distinguished from 
 apparent or merely superficial hostility to the British 
 Empire. 
 
 He recognised long ago, for instance, that our 
 most dangerous enemies both at home and abroad
 
 298 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 are the Germans, and throughout his whole career 
 he has lost no opportunity of checking and check- 
 mating, so far as the cowardice and apathy of the 
 Colonial Office has permitted him, their innumer- 
 able and dishonest attempts to undermine the 
 British supremacy in South Africa. 
 
 If I were asked to name the three men who hate 
 him most bitterly I think I should say Paul Kriiger, 
 Dr. W. J. Leyds and the German Emperor. It is 
 something more than a coincidence that these three 
 men should also be the bitterest and most deter- 
 mined enemies of the British Empire. 
 
 There can hardly be any doubt now in the minds 
 of well-informed people that the conditions which 
 provoked the pitiful attempt at revolution in Johan- 
 nesburg and led up to the Jameson Raid were made 
 in Germany, or at any rate by German hands. The 
 whole thing was what may be described with more 
 force than elegance as "a put up job." 
 
 The idea was to goad the Outlanders to revolt, 
 put the rebellion down by armed force, assert the 
 absolute independence of the Transvaal as a con- 
 sequence, and get rid of that awkward clause in the 
 Convention of 1884 which asserts the suzerainty 
 of Great Britain over the Transvaal by compelling 
 the Pretorian government to submit all its foreign 
 treaties to the supervision of the Colonial Office. 
 
 The next step would have been an offensive and 
 defensive alliance with Germany, and then, if there 
 had been no Special Squadrons or obstacles of that
 
 CECIL RHODES 299 
 
 sort in the way, the Transvaal would have been 
 gradually Germanised. 
 
 It was this that Cecil Rhodes foresaw when he 
 ordered Dr, Jameson to mass his men on the 
 Transvaal frontier. This was, in fact, his answer to 
 the German application to the Portuguese Govern- 
 ment for permission to land sailors and marines from 
 the See-Adler in Delagoa Bay with a view to send- 
 ing them up to Pretoria in violation of the most 
 explicit treaty obligations. 
 
 It is quite plain now that Cecil Rhodes intended 
 this force as a practical hint, and not as an invading 
 army. I remember one night shortly after the Raid, 
 I was smoking the pipe of peace with some of the 
 Transvaal officials on the stoep of President Kriiger's 
 house in Pretoria. We were discussing Cecil Rhodes's 
 complicity in the Raid, and in answer to a sugges- 
 tion that he was at the bottom of it all, I said : 
 " No doubt Rhodes knew all about it. I needn't 
 tell you gentlemen that nothing happens in South 
 Africa that he doesn't know, but he never meant 
 Jameson to cross the frontier when he did. If he 
 had meant invasion he would have had the country 
 by now, but you won't convince me that Cecil 
 Rhodes is such a fool as to try and jump the Trans- 
 vaal with five hundred men." 
 
 The only answer to this was a general laugh. 
 President Kriiger is not supposed to understand 
 English, but he laughed too. 
 
 Of Cecil Rhodes's enemies at home it is so difficult
 
 300 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 to speak with anything like patience that they had 
 better be passed over as briefly as possible. The 
 unceasing hostility of a certain section of the British 
 Press may, to some extent, be accounted for by the 
 fact that he has many powerful financial rivals, and 
 that the Transvaal Government has almost unique 
 opportunities for bribery. 
 
 Few newspapers are quite incorruptible. They 
 are primarily run to pay, and, therefore, it is hardly 
 to be expected that they should be entirely proof 
 against the manifold seductions which an indi- 
 vidual millionaire, or a government with a vast 
 secret service fund, is able to practise upon them. 
 
 It is almost impossible to believe that their 
 hostility is really sincere. They know perfectly 
 well that empire-making cannot be done with kid 
 gloves on. They know, also, that the amount of 
 actual good that Cecil Rhodes has done in South 
 Africa, even apart from empire-making, is almost 
 incalculable. None know this better than the loyal 
 Dutch burghers of the Cape and the Kaffirs. The 
 former call him "the Englishman with the Afrik- 
 ander heart " ; the latter call him their father. But 
 for him there would probably not be many loyal 
 Dutch at all at the Cape ; and but for him also 
 Matabeleland and Mashonaland would still be the 
 happy hunting-ground of King Lobengula's murder- 
 ing, ravaging, and slave-making impis. 
 
 He is, in fact, as was plainly shown in that 
 historic Indaba in the Matoppos, the one white
 
 THAT HISTORIC INDABA IN THE MATOPPOS. 
 (Page 300 )
 
 CECIL RHODES 301 
 
 man in South Africa whom the natives love and 
 trust. It is not many men who, with millions 
 enough to buy everything that the world has to 
 sell in the way of comfort and luxury and honours 
 as distinguished from honour who would have 
 gone as he did, armed only with a walking-stick, 
 into the stronghold of the Matabele, and there won 
 from them the title of "the bull that separates the 
 fighting bulls," in other words, the peacemaker 
 and stopped a war which, if the Imperial authorities 
 had had their way, would have gone on into the 
 next year, and would have cost four or five millions 
 at least. 
 
 It is, by the way, characteristic of the strength 
 of mind and fixity of purpose of this man, that he 
 solemnly warned Sir Richard Martin that, if, after 
 this, the war was continued, he would himself go 
 and live among the Matabele, and wash his hands 
 of the whole affair. 
 
 It is noteworthy, too, that this man, whom Olive 
 Schreiner describes by the mouth of her impossible 
 trooper as "death on niggers," is, in the opinion 
 of the niggers themselves, the greatest friend they 
 ever had. 
 
 If all the work of all the societies and associations 
 of amiable old ladies of both sexes for the Protection 
 of the Aborigines and the Elevation of the Savage 
 were put together, it would not amount to a tithe 
 o f what Cecil Rhodes has done for the natives of 
 South Africa. The Glen-Grey Act alone has almost
 
 302 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 emptied the prisons of kaffir offenders, and as for 
 his work at Kimberley, the effects of which I have 
 myself seen, it would be difficult to speak too highly 
 of it. 
 
 Thus, for instance, it is not generally known that 
 Cecil Rhodes is the greatest practical temperance 
 worker in the world. Every one knows that the 
 curse of all savage races in contact with civilised 
 peoples is liquor. When he was moving the second 
 reading of the Glen-Grey Act he said : 
 
 " I know the curse of liquor. Personally at the 
 Diamond Fields I have assisted in making ten thou- 
 sand of these poor children hard-working and sober. 
 They are now in compounds, healthy and happy. 
 In their former condition the place was a hell upon 
 earth, therefore my heart is thoroughly with the 
 idea of removing liquor from the natives." 
 
 I have myself seen "these poor children" happy, 
 healthy, and sober, in the compounds of Kimberley. 
 In the Transvaal and the Portuguese territory I 
 have seen them drunken, degraded, and diseased, 
 and I am in a position to say that every word of 
 the above quotation is solid fact. I wonder how 
 many of our professional temperance agitators could 
 point to such a splendid achievement as that. 
 
 It seems, perhaps, a good deal to say of Cecil 
 Rhodes that, not only has he enormously increased 
 our area of empire in South Africa, but that he is 
 the only man who can efficiently protect that empire 
 from the two greatest dangers which threaten it.
 
 CECIL RHODES 303 
 
 These are, first, a war of Dutch against British, 
 such as the Pretorian Government and its German 
 allies have been trying so hard to bring about, and 
 for the purposes of which they have been arming 
 themselves to the teeth ; and, second, a general 
 native uprising, which would very probably follow 
 hard on the heels of the racial war. 
 
 Now the only English statesman who is thoroughly 
 believed in by the Dutch majority at the Cape is 
 Cecil Rhodes, and the only white man who is 
 thoroughly trusted and respected by the natives of 
 all tribes is also Cecil Rhodes, and this is a fact 
 which goes very far to account for the desperate 
 anxiety of the Hollander-German-Boer party in 
 South Africa and Europe to get him thoroughly 
 disgraced and discredited over the Jameson fiasco. 
 
 The measure of their failure is not only the 
 measure of his triumph. It is also the measure 
 of the future peace and prosperity of British South 
 Africa. We live too near the man to see him in 
 his just proportions, but, unless Downing Street 
 excels, if that be possible, its own blunders in the 
 past, and unless this royal race of ours suddenly 
 belies all its best traditions, a day must come when 
 the British flag will fly over a federated and united 
 South Africa, when the rule of the Boer will have 
 gone the way of all anachronisms and in that day 
 men will look back and see, in juster perspective 
 than we can do, the great qualities of the man who 
 has made it all possible.
 
 304 MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE 
 
 It is probable that in that day the very names 
 of his enemies and detractors will be forgotten, or 
 remembered only as we remember the name of 
 Cataline in connection with that of Cicero. Then 
 Cecil Rhodes will take his place beside Robert 
 Clive and Warren Hastings, and in some great 
 square of the future Metropolis of the British 
 African Empire, there will stand a statue of him, 
 and on its base will probably be inscribed those 
 memorable words of his : 
 
 " All English : That's my dream ! " 
 
 And with such words I, too, may fittingly bring 
 to a close this all too imperfect series of word- 
 portraits of some, at least, of the Men Who Have 
 Made the Empire. 
 
 BROTHERS, THE GRKSHAM PRESS, WOKING AMD
 
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