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Sir Alfred Milner was only 43—young to be appointed high commissioner to South Africa, in effect the British viceroy for the region. He had, however, already proven himself one of his country's most versatile administrators, and, at this moment of greed for gold, his imperial idealism provided a much-needed gloss of lofty purpose. "It is the British race which built the Empire," he typically proclaimed, "and it is the undivided British race which can alone uphold it.... Deeper, stronger, more primordial than material ties is the bond of common blood."

Milner was a man of driving ambition, in part to regain a lost family position on the steep British class ladder. His grandfather had been a major general and colonial governor, but his ne'er-do-well physician father failed to establish a successful practice in England and had to take a job teaching English in Germany, where Milner was born and spent part of his childhood. He never completely lost the trace of a German accent, and secret embarrassment about this may help explain his fierce, almost religious devotion to the "British race."

That he seemed to have no woman in his life gave an air of mystery to this austere, stern-looking man with a long, somber face and high forehead. Hard-driving and supremely efficient, he was once described by Churchill as "the man of no illusions." Unknown to almost everyone, however, he kept an aspiring actress, Cécile Duval, as a mistress for almost a decade, maintaining her for some £450 a year in South London and slipping away with her for secret boating, cycling, and card-playing holidays. He sometimes stayed at her home, but never she at his. Evidently because she was not of the right class, he seems never to have introduced her to any of his friends.

Milner served in high government positions dealing with finance and taxes, at home and in colonial Egypt. He earned a reputation for being able to quickly absorb the information in a complex mass of documents and for effortlessly understanding numbers—a balance sheet for him, an admiring aide once said, was "as lucid as a page of print." Milner was the ideal colonial civil servant, equal parts technocrat and prophet of empire, and both the British government and the mining magnates thought him the perfect man to bring the arrogant Boers into the empire where they obviously belonged. Queen Victoria gave him a personal sendoff from Windsor Castle, and some 140 dignitaries threw him a farewell dinner at the Café Monico in Piccadilly Circus, where he replied to effusive toasts by vowing to do his best as "a civilian soldier of the Empire." Then, he recorded in his diary, he went "to Brixton ... to see C." He wrote three words, crossed them out, and finally scribbled them in the margin: "to say goodbye."

The brisk, purposeful man who settled into Government House, his official residence in Cape Town beneath the brow of the city's famous mountain, faced a huge challenge. Successfully bringing the Transvaal and its gold under British rule would be an imperial coup of the first order, but it would not be easy. Although European opinion accepted the conquest of Africans as normal, it would never tolerate the overt seizure of African territory controlled by white people.

Meanwhile, a growing rivalry in Europe began to shadow events in southern Africa. The Transvaal was importing rifles from Germany, which had itself jumped into the great race for African land, staking out several colonies. To the fury of the British public, Kaiser Wilhelm II sent the Transvaal's President Kruger a telegram congratulating him on maintaining his independence. With Germany making friendly overtures like this, Milner had no time to waste. For two years, he crisscrossed the southern end of the continent by train, wagon, and horse, tending his realm while negotiating with Kruger, whom he privately referred to as "a frock-coated Neanderthal." Demands, ultimatums, and refusals volleyed back and forth. Far more hawkish than