Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [86]
Chapter Nine
‘Patriotism, conventionally defined as love of country, now turns out rather obviously to stand for love of more country’
John M. Robertson, Patriotism and Empire, 1899
By the end of the nineteenth century no one in the country could have been unaware that Britain commanded the biggest empire the world had ever seen. City streets bore the names of imperial battlefields, and plants brought to Britain by imperial botanists bloomed in suburban gardens. Most of the bread the British ate was made with wheat imported from the empire. Caribbean sugar and Indian tea* were on every high street. ‘Tommy Atkins’, the put-upon imperial soldier, was a stock character in the music hall, and the morning newspapers were his chorus. Writers like Rider Haggard, R. M. Ballantyne, G. A. Henty and plenty of bombastic imitators fed the imaginations of teenage boys with adventure tales like King Solomon’s Mines or With Wolfe in Canada: The Winning of a Continent. It was twenty years since flush-faced drunks had first fallen out of pubs at closing time singing the bouncy chorus lines:
We don’t want to fight, but by Jingo if we do,
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too.
Why, in 1895 Joseph Chamberlain had even turned down an invitation to become home secretary in favour of running the colonies.
The grandest showing-off of empire came two years later, in the festivities to mark Queen Victoria’s sixty years on the throne. The parade ten years earlier, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of her reign, had had a smattering of exotic maharajahs in attendance, but the event was, essentially, a domestic affair, the plump little queen in her black dress receiving the applause of her people. As her reign progressed, the tide of red – the colour chosen by imperial cartographers to mark out British possessions – lapped across the world so quickly that maps had to be recoloured and reference books rewritten. By 1897 the ambitions of Germany were a cloud on the horizon, but there had really been no power to challenge Britain’s pre-eminent status since the defeat of Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo in 1815. The army was twice the size it had been when Victoria ascended to the throne, the navy four times larger. Joseph Chamberlain – ‘Joseph Africanus’ as the press called him – proposed that the diamond-jubilee parade should show the world what was what.
Just before she set out to take part in the parade that bright June morning Victoria went to the telegraph room in Buckingham Palace and sent a message across the world. ‘[From my heart I] thank my beloved people. May God bless them,’ she said. Love them – in an odd, distant, hierarchical sort of way – she probably did. For years courtiers had twittered at the inappropriateness of her closeness to Abdul Karim – ‘the Munshi’ – who had filled the void left by the death of her Scottish ghillie, John Brown. The empire had been none of her doing – she merely had the good fortune to accede to the throne at a time that enabled her to become the Mother of the ‘Mother Country’. But she certainly loved the baubles of empire, badgering her favourite Prime Minister for the title ‘Empress of India’ in order, among other considerations, that her eldest daughter’s marriage to the Crown Prince of Prussia should not mean that as an empress she would one day outrank her mother. In 1876, when Disraeli enabled her to sign herself ‘Queen and Empress’ (of a place she had never set eyes upon) he made an ageing widow very happy.
By the measure of history this period of British glory had been short lived, and the city through which the queen processed still seemed an almost accidental imperial capital. But the work of rebuilding