Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [38]
The supremacy and security of that time had not long to endure, and Balfour had weaknesses which, as the century turned over into less indulgent years, were to become apparent. Including the weaknesses, he was in character and attributes the final flower of the patrician and of him might have been said what Proust’s housekeeper, Celeste, said on the death of her employer, “When one has known M. Proust everyone else seems vulgar.”
Not since Rome had imperial dominion been flung as wide as Britain’s now. It extended over a quarter of the land surface of the world, and on June 22, 1897, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, its living evidence marched in splendid ranks to the Thanksgiving service at St. Paul’s. The occasion being designed to celebrate the imperial family under the British Crown, none of the foreign kings who had assisted at the Golden Jubilee in 1887 were this time invited. In their place, carriages of state carried the eleven colonial premiers of Canada, New Zealand, the Cape Colony, Natal, Newfoundland and the six states of Australia. In the parade rode cavalry from every quarter of the globe: the Cape Mounted Rifles, the Canadian Hussars, the New South Wales Lancers, the Trinidad Light Horse, the magnificent turbaned and bearded Lancers of Khapurthala, Badnagar and other Indian states, the Zaptichs of Cyprus in tasseled fezzes on black-maned ponies. Dark-skinned infantry regiments, “terrible and beautiful to behold,” in the words of a rhapsodic press, swung down the streets in a fantasy of variegated uniforms: the Borneo Dyak Police, the Jamaica Artillery, the Royal Nigerian Constabulary, giant Sikhs from India, Houssas from the Gold Coast, Chinese from Hong Kong, Malays from Singapore, Negroes from the West Indies, British Guiana and Sierra Leone; company after company passed before a dazzled people, awestruck at the testimony of their own might. At the end of the procession in an open state landau drawn by eight cream horses came the day’s central figure, a tiny person in black with cream-colored feathers nodding from her bonnet. The sun shone, bright banners rippled in the breeze, lampposts were decked in flowers and along six miles of streets millions of happy people cheered and waved in an ecstasy of love and pride. “No one ever, I believe, has met with such an ovation as was given me,” wrote the Queen in her Journal. “Every face seemed to be filled with real joy. I was much moved and gratified.”
Already for some months there had been an aura of self-congratulation in the air, “a certain optimism,” said Rudyard Kipling, “that scared me.” It moved him to write, and on the morning after the parade the stern warning of “Recessional” appeared in The Times. Its impact was immense—“The greatest poem that has been written by any living man,” pronounced the distinguished jurist, Sir Edward Clarke. Yet however solemnly people took its admonition, how could they believe, as the ceremonies and salutes continued and top-hatted personages came and went to the Imperial Conference in Whitehall, that all this visible greatness was really “one with Nineveh and Tyre”?
On October 11, 1899, a distant challenge, which had been growing stronger ever since the Jameson Raid, became explicit and the Boer War began. “Joe’s War,” Lord Salisbury called it in tribute to the aggressive role of the cuckoo in his nest, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary.