Ghosts of Empire (26 page)

The kingdom of Upper Burma was taken completely by surprise by the rapidity of the British advance. The Burmese had no time to collect and organize their forces to oppose it. On 16 November the Burmese defensive guns on both banks of the Irrawaddy were taken by a land attack, without any resistance. The next day, however, at Minhla, on the right bank of the river, the Burmese were gathered in considerable force. This position was attacked by a brigade of British Indian infantry on shore, covered by a bombardment from the river. The Burmese were decisively defeated with a loss of 170 killed and 276 taken prisoner, while many others were drowned attempting to escape by river. Harry Prendergast and his flotilla now approached Mandalay, where the General received the unconditional surrender of the Burmese government on 27 November, and the triumphant British forces entered Mandalay at three in the afternoon the following day. Thibaw was shocked by the collapse of his soldiers. Sladen walked into the palace and the council chamber where he sat down for a few minutes, while the King was informed of what had happened, after which Thibaw came to see Sladen in the council chamber. Thibaw's queen
and mother-in-law were also present. Thibaw then said, ‘I surrender myself and my country to you. All I ask is, don't let me be taken away suddenly. Let me have a day or two to prepare.'
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Sladen insisted on an ‘immediate departure from his capital and country'. Thibaw and his wife were sent into exile in British India, where the ex-King died in 1916, at the age of fifty-nine.

On Tuesday 8 December, less than two weeks after Thibaw had left Burma, his white elephant, the symbol of sovereignty, died. The animal had perished of ‘neglect', as Sladen noted in his diary. Some, more romantically, attributed the cause of death to a broken heart. The British had ‘great trouble' disposing of its corpse.
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The animal was dragged pathetically, ‘in full view of a shocked public, out of the palace gates'; this was distressing to the Burmese people, who had been brought up to believe in the elephant's near-divine status. Mandalay, a centre of Buddhist culture, had been captured. A system of learning and religious instruction had collapsed overnight. What would the British do now? As Sladen himself observed in his meticulous diary, there had been a massive reversal of fortune. On 16 December, he noted ‘what ignorance and want of reason is shown in persons who expect a country just brought under a foreign yoke to settle down in a day!' He observed that a monarchy ‘extending over a thousand years has been upset in a day–the whole framework of native government obliterated and brought to a sudden termination'.
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There was still no final resolution of Burma's future. Thibaw was gone, but who, or what, would replace him remained uncertain.

The fate of Burma was decided, as in so many cases in the empire, by chance and circumstance. It happened that the new secretary of state for India in the Conservative government was Lord Randolph Churchill, who is better known today as the father of Sir Winston. In the 1880s, however, he was a dynamic political force. Lord Randolph enjoyed one of those careers which shines brightly for an instant and then fizzles into nothingness. Yet, despite the fitful nature of his contribution to domestic British politics and the spasmodic nature of his moods and poses, his impact on the history of Burma was considerable.

After the Indian Mutiny of 1857, it had been an established principle of the British Empire not to annex other countries directly. The favoured way of dealing with native kingdoms was to preserve the façade of native rule, and so maharajas, nawabs and feudal princes were flattered and made to feel important; they were also given appropriate salaries in accordance with their status. Even if Britain exercised the ultimate authority, the sensitivities of local populations were respected. In the case of Burma, Lord Mayo, then Viceroy of India, had effectively ruled annexation out as long ago as 1869. ‘The future annexation of Burmah, or any of its adjacent states, is not an event which I either contemplate or desire,' he had declared in a letter written from the summer capital at Simla. Mayo, an orthodox Conservative, who had been appointed by Disraeli, viewed ‘with extreme regret any course of action which would impose on the British Government the necessity of occupation'. He did not believe that it would be expedient to incur the added cost of invading the country. Like the good Conservative he was, he simply wished that the ‘status quo as regards the relations' between India ‘and the kingdom of Burmah should be maintained'.
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This was the general attitude until the mid-1880s. It is true that hotheads in British Burma, in Rangoon especially, wanted to get rid of the Burmese monarchy and annex Upper Burma outright. The officials on the ground, however, were more cautious. By coming into the India Office, Churchill changed this situation. In 1885, Lord Randolph Churchill was only thirty-six years old. After a typical, if unspectacular, aristocratic education at Eton and Oxford, where he distinguished himself as a chess player, Lord Randolph's career in Parliament had started in 1874, when he was elected the member for Woodstock in Oxfordshire. The Woodstock seat, being practically in the grounds of Blenheim Palace, the country seat of the Spencer-Churchill family, belonged to him almost by right, but, despite his hereditary advantages, he had spent his first six years in Parliament without achieving much in the way of fame or notoriety.

After 1880, however, Lord Randolph's natural exuberance began to reveal itself. He was a brilliant mimic and satirist, who delighted in poking fun at graver, more seasoned politicians. His energy was as forceful as his mind was scattered and unfocused. In the words of his famous son, Lord Randolph was ‘capable upon emergency of prolonged and vehement exertion, of manifold activities and pugnacities, of leaps and heaves beyond the common strength of men', and yet ‘he suffered by reaction fits of utter exhaustion and despondency. Most people grow tired before they are overtired. But Lord Randolph Churchill was of the temper that gallops till it falls.'
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His attitude to Burma was more in the ‘galloping' style. Without Lord Randolph, the annexation of Burma might never have occurred. As Winston Churchill wrote in his hagiography of his father, ‘Lord Randolph Churchill was for annexation simple and direct.' The timid bureaucrats of the imperial service might have ‘preferred the establishment of a native prince under British advice', the old policy of supporting ‘native princes'. Lord Salisbury, the Conservative Prime Minister, fretted about the cost, but, in the end, ‘the Secretary of State for India prevailed'.

The annexation itself was announced in a perfunctory way, in a style that was both brutal and clear: ‘By command of the Queen-Empress, it is hereby notified that the territories formerly governed by King Theebaw will no longer be under his rule, but have become part of Her Majesty's dominions, and will during Her Majesty's pleasure be administered by
such officers as the Viceroy and Governor-General of India may from time to time appoint.' Winston Churchill observed that it ‘is one of the shortest documents of the kind on historical record'. The annexation was proclaimed on New Year's Day, 1886, a fitting present for the Queen-Empress. Lord Randolph was good enough to announce this important event at a party, as the clock, ushering in the new year, struck twelve.
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The comparative fluidity of British politics in the years 1885 and 1886 meant that there was no firm policy direction coming from Westminster, a political uncertainty that was a key ingredient in the development of imperial policy thousands of miles away in the Irrawaddy delta. The year 1885 witnessed two governments in London. In early June Gladstone's Liberal administration, which had been in office since 1880, was defeated in a vote of the House of Commons on an amendment the Conservatives had moved to the Liberal budget. Seventy-six Liberal MPs were absent from the vote, a sign of lax party discipline, while Charles Stewart Parnell led his cohort of Irish Nationalist MPs into the opposition lobby. An immediate election was not practicable, because the recent parliamentary reforms passed earlier in the year had not been fully implemented. Despite this lack of an election, the Conservatives immediately formed a minority government as a consequence of the Liberal defeat in the Commons. The general election which finally took place in November brought no decisive result, and so the Conservatives continued in office until the end of January 1886, when they, in turn, were defeated in a Commons vote. The ensuing Liberal government proved to be one of the shortest lived in British history, as it fell on the defeat of the Home Rule Bill for Ireland in June that same year.
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Against this constantly shifting background of domestic politics, a decisive character prone to bold gestures, like Randolph Churchill, could in the absence of determined opposition affect the direction of the empire. As Gladstone himself remarked, in a speech in the House of Commons at the end of January 1886, ‘Parliament usually prorogues at the end of July, and meets again six months after,' which had the result that the whole of the Burma campaign had begun and ended while MPs were in their constituencies or country estates. Churchill had used the Crown's prerogative to annex the kingdom of Burma, bypassing the House of Commons.
As an MP of more than fifty years' standing, Gladstone immediately understood the significance of what had happened. The seventy-five-year-old Liberal leader knew that ‘the prerogative of making peace or war is in the hands of Her Majesty', yet he appealed to the common practice and tradition of parliamentary sovereignty on the question of whether to wage war. He argued that, despite the royal prerogative, in practice matters pertaining to peace and war were for the House of Commons to decide. On the whole, ‘the wars made by this country are generally, through the privileges and rights of this House, practically under an effective prior control'.
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Lord Randolph Churchill, by contrast, had presented the annexation of the kingdom and the prior campaign as a fait accompli. Gladstone protested vehemently against this flouting of parliamentary privilege. ‘Under these circumstances, I say that we have no Parliamentary control whatever over these wars.' With regard to the hiatus of six months in the parliamentary year, the ‘Indian Forces may be operating to any extent during the whole of that period'. Then there would be ‘nothing for the House of Commons to do but say in the subsequent session whether they will or will not pay the bill'. Lord Randolph Churchill, by his impulsive actions, had surprised the Liberals on the opposition benches. Ever the pragmatic politician, Gladstone realized that his party had no ‘power remaining, except to condemn the Government'. Other Liberal MPs followed his lead in the last weeks of January and the beginning of February 1886. The brief parliamentary debate over Burma gives an interesting insight into the dynamics of British politics in the last decades of Queen Victoria's reign.

Burma was annexed in a period during which a minority Conservative administration was in power; it is doubtful if such a decisive expansion of the British Empire would have been accomplished under a Liberal government. It is also interesting to note that, during the parliamentary debate on issues arising out of the annexation, it was Liberal MPs from Scotland and Wales who were most vocal in denouncing Randolph Churchill's bold stroke of imperial policy.

William Hunter, the MP for Aberdeen North, was a professor of Roman law at University College London. Born in 1844, he had just been elected to Parliament in 1885, at the age of forty-one. A brilliant Scottish lawyer,
he began his parliamentary career by moving an amendment to a bill ‘expressing regret that the revenues of India had been applied to defray the expenses of the military operations in Ava without the consent of Parliament'. With his keen lawyer's mind, Hunter spoke very bluntly about the Conservative government's latest imperial adventure. He saw that ‘a great territory had been added to this Empire without the consent of the people of Burmah, and without the consent of the people of England'. More particularly, the government had ‘met overwhelming defeat in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales' and there had been no parliamentary consent given to use money from the government of India against Thibaw and his cronies in Mandalay. Hunter made an impassioned plea in support of subject colonial peoples everywhere when he said that the ‘Burmese people, like all other peoples, would rather bear the vices of their native rulers than the virtues of foreign officials'.
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Despite the creation of a new Liberal government in February 1886, the Conservative policy was not overturned. The annexation of Burma had been a major development in imperial policy. In early 1886, having failed to win a clear majority in the general election held the previous November, the Liberals were not strong enough politically to reverse the annexation proclamation. Gladstone appreciated this. His ministers and MPs were not enthusiastic about the situation which Churchill had left them and, in the House of Lords, the new Secretary of State, Lord Kimberley, beat the old Liberal anti-imperialist drum: trade was an ‘unjustifiable' reason for war. One senses that Kimberley uttered through gritted teeth his pledge to ‘maintain Burmah under the direct administration of the British Crown'. He very correctly observed that recently ‘we have wisely made it our policy to avoid as much as possible the annexation of Native States'. The implication was clear: Churchill had not been ‘wise'.
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Yet the Liberal government was in no position to undo what Lord Randolph, in his exuberance, had done.

Some Liberal MPs in the House of Commons were more openly hostile to this latest expression of imperial adventurism than their pragmatic government. Henry Richard, MP for Merthyr Tydfil, is perhaps little remembered today and, although his statue stands proudly in the centre of his former constituency, he remains an obscure figure on the national
stage. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, however, he was known not only as the ‘Apostle of Peace' but also as the ‘Member for Wales', so completely identified was he with the interests of that country. A Nonconformist minister, now well into his seventies, he had represented Merthyr Tydfil since 1868. He has been described as ‘not only the consummate Victorian radical, but also the consummate Victorian Welshman'.
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His intervention in the debate on Burma would provide a fitting conclusion to his legacy of liberal pacifism. He had spent his career denouncing what he called the ‘war system'. ‘My hope for the abatement of the war system lies in the permanent conviction of the people, rather than the policies of cabinets or the discussions of parliaments,' he once declared.