Heligoland (11 page)

Victoria certainly had plenty of reason to doubt whether Germany’s ‘unscrupulous despotic Government’ could be trusted to safeguard the human rights of the Heligolanders. Mary Kingsley, the niece of the royal chaplain Charles Kingsley (better known as the author of
The Water Babies
) was an intrepid travel writer. From her perceptive accounts of her journeys through territories in West Africa, Victoria would have been aware of Germany’s cruel methods of inflicting bloody punishments on dissenters. The German authorities could not even be relied upon to behave humanely towards their fellow-citizens in Europe. Indeed, on 13 May, the very day that Salisbury was meeting with Hatzfeldt at the Foreign Office to offer to hand over Heligoland, British newspapers carried stories about a gas workers’ strike in Hamburg that was crushed with much bloodshed.

Salisbury was apparently so determined to hand over Heligoland as the price for securing stability in East Africa that he was willing to sacrifice his conscience to his ambition. Remarkably this was the same man who in April 1864, as a fortuneless young MP called Robert Cecil, had written a brilliant article in the
Quarterly Review
condemning the German expansion into, and brutal military occupation of, Schleswig-Holstein.
⁴
In the years since he wrote that piece, it would doubtless have been brought to Salisbury’s attention that the plebiscite provided for in the 1864 Treaty of Prague, by which the Danes of North Schleswig were to be given an opportunity to decide their own fate, had never been held. The Danish ‘optants’, who had the right to choose Danish citizenship, were forced to do military service in the Prussian Army or to leave the country, and the Danish language was steadily being displaced by German in the schools. Elsewhere on its frontiers, such as Poland and Alsace-Lorraine, wherever the German Empire included non-Germans, there had often been harshness and repression on the one side, provoking discontent and hostility on the other.

In respect of Germany’s empire overseas, matters were even worse. The Chancellor of the Exchequer George Goschen wrote to Salisbury on 10 October 1888: ‘German insolence with native races constitutes a very serious difficulty. Look at Samoa! I felt as if they behaved disgracefully there. And would not the proposed partnership, unless most carefully guarded, expose us to some of the evil results of the German method of action?’
⁵
Lord Salisbury was fully aware that Germany was not to be trusted in that regard, as is evident from a letter he wrote to the British Consul at Zanzibar, Gerald Portal, on 25 November 1888: ‘The whole question of Zanzibar is both difficult and dangerous, for we are perforce partners with the Germans whose political morality diverges from ours on many points.’

Bowing to pressure from the full Cabinet, which, on 7 June, after heated and lengthy discussion, insisted the question of Heligoland required more ‘careful sifting’, Salisbury appointed a special ad hoc Cabinet Committee. This pivotal ministerial group consisted of Salisbury himself; the Chancellor, George Goschen; the Leader of the Commons, W.H. Smith; the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Arthur Balfour; the Secretary of War, Edward Stanhope; and the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord George Hamilton.
⁶
They assembled at a specially convened meeting in Downing Street to confer with naval experts on the question and reported to a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday 10 June. Her Majesty’s furious telegram was duly read out to the assembled ministers. Doubtless her inference that she was ready to refuse to sanction Salisbury’s swap scheme offered heart to those members of the Cabinet uneasy about relinquishing Britain’s North Sea possession. Salisbury must have been alarmed by this because he probably thought Victoria would be more likely to reject the proposals if they were not unanimously endorsed by the Cabinet.

Some details of that momentous meeting on 10 June did come to light many years later. Salisbury’s biographer Aubrey Kennedy wrote in 1953 that the Admiralty had admitted this ‘untenable advanced base’ was valueless to Britain, but the curious point was made that the island was a splendid recruiting ground for the Royal Navy. Its inhabitants were described as ‘born seamen favourable to the British connection, and splendid material for bluejackets’. The meeting completed, Salisbury hurried to his desk and skilfully composed a letter to the queen in which he summarised the decisions taken about the Heligolanders, and the wider implications of the swap scheme with regard to Britain’s position in Africa. In accordance with his instructions the letter was ciphered and telegraphed to her at Balmoral that evening.

He began by reporting that his colleagues were of the opinion that in any agreement arrived at with Germany the ‘rights of the people of Heligoland should be carefully preserved’. That, he assured her, had been done. Next he detailed the specific safeguards for them he had demanded on 5 June, and which Kaiser Wilhelm had provisionally decided to accept. Salisbury informed Victoria that ‘no actual subject of your Majesty living now will be subject to naval or military conscription. The existing customs tariff will be maintained for a period of years and every person wishing to retain his British nationality will have the right to do so.’

Purposely blurring Victoria’s concerns, expressed in her 9 June telegram, about the risks of setting a precedent of being guided by the electoral decisions of colonial peoples, Salisbury assured her that anything like a plebiscite would be very dangerous as it would admit the right of the inhabitants of an imperial post to decide for themselves as to the allegiances of that possession. To that effect it might be used by discontented people in Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus and even India. Certainly in the context of the times it would have been rather unusual for the wishes of the colonial peoples to be consulted. The crucial issue of the wishes of the Heligolanders Salisbury now sidestepped. The Cabinet, he claimed, thought it was ‘impracticable’ to obtain the formal consent of the two thousand inhabitants. He then embarked on a series of untruths by telling her that the information available to the Cabinet suggested that ‘the population, which is
not British, but Frisian
, would readily come under the German Empire if protected from conscription’.

This was quite untrue. The inhabitants were as distinct from the Frisians as the island itself was totally detached from the Frisian Islands. Furthermore, as citizens of the British Empire the Heligolanders were already substantially British. Salisbury then rounded off this section of the telegram with the dubious remark: ‘On these grounds the Cabinet
unanimously
recommend the arrangement for Your Majesty’s sanction.’

In this way Salisbury convinced Queen Victoria that there was now no effective constitutional means by which she could impede the process of the Heligoland swap, and on 11 June 1890 she reluctantly sent the following telegram to her Prime Minister in London: ‘Your cipher about Heligoland received. The conditions you enumerate are sound and the alliance of Germany valuable; but that any of my possessions should be thus bartered away causes me great uneasiness, and I can only consent on receiving a positive assurance from you that the present arrangement constitutes no precedent.’ The following day Salisbury replied, claiming that he and his colleagues well understood that Heligoland could not be a precedent: ‘It is absolutely peculiar. The island is a very recent conquest.’ On 12 June Victoria despatched her final telegram on the subject of the negotiations: ‘Your answer respecting Heligoland forming no possible precedent I consider satisfactory. I sanction the proposed cession or almost exchange. But I must repeat that I think you may find great difficulties in the future. Giving up what one has is always a bad thing.’

Victoria was right to feel uneasy. She probably never knew how fully Salisbury had deceived her. The reality was that there was no unanimity – nor even a majority – in Cabinet in favour of the cession. From German foreign policy documents, released many years later, it has become possible to understand what happened. On the evening of 11 June, the day after the special Downing Street meeting, Count Hatzfeldt, the German ambassador, sent a secret telegram to Chancellor Caprivi. Salisbury had just informed him that ‘the Cabinet has declared, with
certain reservations
, its adherence to the agreement arrived at privately between the Prime Minister and myself. This fact is of importance, for Lord Salisbury repeatedly and confidentially informed me yesterday that certain Ministers
had opposed him
to the end.’ Nevertheless, on 17 June a preliminary agreement on Africa and Heligoland was initialled in Berlin by Sir Percy Anderson and Count Hatzfeldt.
⁷

Had Salisbury done a secret deal with his dissenting Cabinet colleagues? His next move was extraordinary and indicates that he was prepared to go to astonishing lengths to buy their public silence. To mollify those ministers who were ill at ease with the Heligoland cession and the outline Anglo-German Agreement, Salisbury now took the radical step of deciding that these two aspects should be split so Parliament could consider them separately. Cunningly, in accordance with his negotiating position with Germany, he arranged to make acceptance of the overall Anglo-German Agreement package subject to a vote on the Heligoland issue, which would be called soon after extensive parliamentary debate in both Houses of Parliament. Throughout the negotiations with Germany, Heligoland had been the tantalising bait he had used to lure the Germans away from East Africa. However, in Westminster during the summer he would offer the prospect of settling boundaries in Africa as the prize for ditching Heligoland.

It seems quite likely that Salisbury was encouraged to opt for a strategy of separating the two debates by George Goschen, Chancellor of the Exchequer. Certainly in order to soothe parliamentary and public opinion he was urged by Goschen to provide an explanation of the deal ‘so as to explain it more fully to the common herd’.
⁸
Unusually, Salisbury authorised the publication of carefully selected official correspondence concerning the swap. More exceptional was the inclusion of recent communications between himself and Queen Victoria, including a cipher telegram that he had sent her on 12 June.
⁹
In his dealings with Parliament on the question of Heligoland, Salisbury was clearly prepared to be quite unprincipled. From the outset he ruthlessly sought to besmirch the hapless island by grossly exaggerating its frailties and minimising its virtues. These deliberately harmful misrepresentations began in the first parliamentary phase of the transfer of Heligoland.

Since the spring of 1890 there had been repeated stories at Westminster and in the British press about Sir Percy Anderson’s mission in Berlin to harmonise the colonial boundaries in East Africa, but at no time had Heligoland
ever
been mentioned in such a context. Thus the news that the two were to be linked in a swap was greeted with total shock and amazement. On the British side the divulgence was personally orchestrated by Salisbury himself. It was done at midnight on 17 June by means of depositing in the Vote Office of the Houses of Parliament a copy of a despatch dated 14 June which Salisbury, in his capacity as Foreign Secretary, had sent to Ambassador Malet in Berlin, instructing him that Anderson was returning to that city immediately to finalise the deal.

In that despatch Salisbury summarised the outline agreement which had been reached on the disputed spheres of interest in East Africa: the Witu coast, Zanzibar and the area at Lake Victoria north of the 1st degree of S. latitude. On Heligoland, Salisbury wrote with needless damnation:

The few copies of the despatch had been deposited so very late at the Westminster Vote Office on the night of 17 June that not one MP had a chance to read it. However, it was soon noticed by hawk-eyed parliamentary correspondents from
The Times
. With almost unbelievable speed they rushed the long despatch to their newspaper offices and within hours it appeared in print in full.

Auspiciously, an eclipse of the sun that morning cast an eerie, though scarcely perceptible, shadow over much of southern Britain. It was patchy, visible in some counties, obscured by cloud in others.
The Times
newspapers, which appeared at the breakfast tables of the good, the great and the influential that morning, contained a relevant leading article which by some extraordinary feat its staff also had been able to put together in a few hours. Just as Lord Salisbury had expected, however, it was an historically distorted and scathing interpretation of his despatch to Malet. It stated as accepted fact: ‘Indeed, the connection between the little Frisian island and Great Britain is extremely slight, and is not even sacred by long prescription.
It came to us as a part of the possessions of the Hanoverian Kings
, and remained British in 1814, because of its proximity to Hanover.’ What the staff at
The Times
did not know was the sentence referring to the Hanoverian kings was precisely the one which the Prime Minister had used in his telegram to Queen Victoria on 12 June.

One consequence of the story of Edward Thornton’s negotiation of the Treaty of Kiel never having been told was that Salisbury was able to distort history enough to deceive his queen. In fact, the Congress of Vienna (which dealt with Hanover) was signed on 9 June
1815
, while it was the Treaty of Kiel that was signed in 1814, by which
Denmark
agreed to make peace with England, Sweden and Russia. Heligoland had
never
been a jewel in any German crown. So was this faulty editorial in
The Times
an early example of deliberate governmental spin-doctoring? Perhaps it was just a careless late-night misinterpretation of what Salisbury’s despatch had seemed to state. Its significance was far-reaching, as it reinforced Germany’s historically groundless fantasies about their links with Heligoland. Salisbury had won the first round.