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Chamberlain and 44 The Raid "
THE Parliamentary; Committee of enquiry into the Jameson Raid included, in its condemnation of Rhodes and Jameson, a censure on Sir Graham Bower, the High Commissioner's Imperial Secretary, for having, on his own admission, known beforehand of Rhodes's part in promoting the abortive Johannesburg revolution and then not disclosing this knowledge to his chief, Sir Hercules Robinson. Bower was dismissed, and never again received the kind of appoint- ment in the Colonial Service for which he had had good reason to hope. He left to the South African Library at Cape Town a mass of papers to be kept unpublished for 50 years after the Raid. These, as well as the private papers of Sir James Rose Innes, subsequently Chief Justice of South Africa, have now been used by Dr. Jean van der Poel in her book on the Jameson Raid. So far as Bower's own case is concerned, it now appears that, while he did not himself tell Robinson what Rhodes told him, he did tell Rhodes to do so, and that Rhodes assured him that he had told him the whole story.
Robinson afterwards stoutly denied that he had been told anything, and wasr indeed, prepared to come from his sick bed to testify to that effect before the Select Committee. There is no reason to believe that Robinson was deliberately untruthful. Reading between the lines of Bower's own story, one surmises that Robinson, determined not to know anything so embarrassing, had cut Rhodes short, then firmly banished from his mind -whatever he may have heard or guessed. But, in view of this flat conflict of testimony, Bower was persuaded by the Colonial Office to give his evidence in a form which excluded the High CommiSsioner. This, unfortunately, laid him open to the Select Committee's censure and 'to its unhappy conse- quences for his career.
Miss van der Peel's object, however, would seem to have been, not so much to vindicate the reputation of an otficial who sacrificed himself in order to shield his immediate chief, as to revive the old charge that Chamberlain was in the Rhodes-Jameson plot "up to the neck." To this task she has devoted an immense amount of detailed research. Whether her research has, in fact, disclosed more than her own preconceived conviction is another question. It is impossible in a brief review to quote the many passages in which her inter- pretation of the facts or of the documents has seemed, to me at least, incompatible with any detached judgement. When Chamberlain, both immediately after the Raid and again in 1897, very naturally refused to allow the Raid to divert attention from the intolerable political situation in the Transvaal, she can only conclude that he was bent on stoking up a war in order to " kill the enquiry " and so escape exposure. That exposure, in her view, was only averted by the " Lying in State at Westminster," in other words by the failure of the Select Committee to find Chamberlain guilty of complicity in the Rhodes-Jameson plot.
In that connection her main argument is based on the telegrams from Rhodes's agents, more particularly Rutherford Harris and Hawksley, to their chief, implying Chamberlain's concurrence, which she regards as conclusive unless they are to be dismissed as gross and deliberate perversions. She brushes aside the more obvious explana- tion that they were the inaccurate interpretations of agents anxious to please an imperious chief. For her the fact that Lord Grey was a party to the telegram from Rochfort Maguire to tell Rhodes to " hurry up " (based on Chamberlain's opinion at the moment of the Venezuela crisis that, if the Johannesburg rising could not be postponed for a year or two, it had better come soon) constitutes clear evidence of Chamberlain's complicity. She does not, however, quote Grey's letter to Chamberlain, given by Garvin in his Life of Chamberlain, stating that " you did not know and could not know of any plan or intention of Mr. Rhodes which could possibly lead to such an invasion of the Transvaal in time of peace as was perpetrated by Dr. Jameson."
As for the Select Committee, it may have failed to ask some of the questions Dr. van der Poel thinks it should have asked. But the Conunittee had at any rate one advantage not possessed by the most diligent investigator 50 years later. It could judge, not only the answers, but.the demeanour and personality of the witnesses. Con- clusive on that point was the statement in Parliament of his political opponent, Sir W. Harcourt, that, whatever Harris might say or insinuate, " I who have seen the witnesses would believe the Colonial Secretary and Lord Selbome." One last instance of Dr. van der Peel's reasoning. On July 26th, 1897, a debate was raised in Parliament by a motion to expunge Rhodes's name from the Privy Council. In resisting it Chamberlain
was bound, all the more so as he had signed the Select Committee's condemnation of Rhodes, to remind the House of his general services to the Empire. In view, too, of the suggestions at the enquiry and in the House that all Rhodes's actions had been prompted by Stock Exchange motives, he added that there was nothing affecting Rhodes's " personal position as a man of honour," making it clear a few sentences later that this referred directly to the charge of share-rigging. There were some who thought Chamberlain had gone too far in the general phrase used in his paler sentence. For Miss van der Peel the incident affords convincing proof of the fact that Chamber- lain was forced to pay his tribute to Rhodes by threats of exposure from Hawksley and his associates ! All history needs rewriting from time to time in the light of a new perspective as well as of new information. A fresh account of the events which led up to the Jameson Raid might be valuable. If so, the Bower and Rose-lnnes papers obviously deserve careful study ; but in a very different temper from that in which Miss van der Peel has addressed herself to her task. Meanwhile a comparison of her work with the relevant chapters in Garvin's Life leave one reader at any rate in no doubt as to where the balance of truth lies. What- ever Chamberlain may have known or guessed about Rhodes's part in encouraging the projected Johannesburg rising, he never con- templated the Raid or any other unauthorised use of the police force on the Transvaal frontier. As Harcourt said of his conduct when he heard of the Raid : " Is it possible that any man who had been a party or an accomplice in those transactions could have acted upon the spur of the moment as the Colonial Secretary acted ? There is no jury in the country
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