In 1649 the mother of them all had arrived. He was the fifty-year-old commander of the New Model Army, Oliver Cromwell. Ugly as a tortoise and clad like one in a corset of steel, he brought his God with him and shipped into Dublin with a zealous commitment to the Almighty’s work: ‘The sword without, the terror within.’ Intoxicated with Biblical fervour and high on his own juice, Cromwell took his Protestant militia from city to town, town to village, exterminating Catholics as he went.
Like the Victorians after him, this monster purported to believe that his colonial enterprise was ordained by God, and it was a God ‘who would not permit His wrath to be turned aside’.
The massacres were fêtes of blood, down to the last innocent baby. Those who weren’t immediately put to the sword were stripped and left to starve. Some women had their hands and arms cut off, ‘yea, jointed alive’, wrote one contemporary observer, ‘to make them confess where their money was’ (my emphasis).
Those who were spared were shipped out in bondage, 50,000 of them in all. The first slaves in the British West Indies, at Barbados, were Irish men, women and children.
According to Victorian academic James Allanson Picton, the most effective piece of artillery in the English army was the name ‘Oliver Cromwell’: ‘He made it a terror, and it has remained a curse.’ A curse it was, a damnation visited upon Ireland that would endure for another 272 years.25
‘Without exception’, wrote Her Majesty’s most despised journalist, Henry Labouchère MP, the British were ‘the greatest robbers and marauders that ever existed’. Their plunder, said he, was ‘hypocritical’, because ‘they always pretended it was for other people’s good’.
One exponent of this benevolence (and never mind the bollocks) was Field Marshal Viscount Wolseley, Commander in Chief of the British Army. ‘War,’ he opined, ‘is good for humanity’:
Wherever we hoist our flag, there we honestly strive – not always, I confess, with complete success – to establish those immutable principles of even-handed justice, and of improved morality … As a nation, we can point with pride to territories once barbarous but now civilised, in every corner of the globe. The wars which extend our frontiers bring new territory under the influence of missionary work, of our laws, and civilisation.26
An alternative view of this ‘missionary work’ was recorded by a Swedish cleric called Charles Lumholtz in Victoria in 1888: ‘To kill a native of Australia is the same as killing a dog in the eyes of the British colonist.’ Expanding his critique, Lumholtz writes: ‘Your men made a point of hunting the Blacks, every Sunday [presumably after church] in the neighbourhood of their cities … systematically passing the whole day in that sport, simply for pleasure’s sake [his emphasis].’
And what a pleasure it must have been: ‘A party of four or five horsemen prepare traps, or driving the savages into a narrow pass, force them to seek refuge on precipitous cliffs, and while the unfortunate wretches are climbing at their life’s peril, one bullet after another is fired at them, making even the slightly wounded lose their hold, and falling down, break and tear themselves into shreds on the sharp rocks below.’27
Cracking shot, Johnny! Thank you, sir!
‘Although local law (on paper) punishes murder,’ continues Lumholtz, ‘it is in reality only the killing of a white man which is called murder’ (again, his emphasis).
Just who did these Christian civilisers think they were kidding? From which of their Ten Commandments did they consider themselves exempt? You can stuff all that twaddle, old boy. They’re infidels with a different god.
Which unquestionably was true. All tanned foreigners in receipt of British lead were subject to the delusion of a different god (it was only their gold that was real). In India they had one god with three heads, and in England we had three gods with one head: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Consequently, it’s quite likely that God looked more like a British officer with half a bear on his head than a man with a bone through his nose.
Twenty-five thousand black bears a year were slaughtered to make hats for the British Army, and fashionable London ladies liked their hummingbirds skinned alive, a technique which apparently added lustre to the chapeau.28
Meanwhile, back in Africa, where the degraded races wore fur and feathers, white men were endlessly hacking at jungle to get at the loot. This was dark and dangerous territory; the continent was still largely unexplored. It was therefore always possible to face sudden confrontation with wild and dangerous men. There was a high chance, for example, of Sir Cecil Rhodes, or Major R.S. Baden-Powell, suddenly springing upon you from the thicket.
Baden-Powell was one of Wolseley’s breed of chaps, ‘an ambitious little man’ who on the side ‘enjoyed dressing up at concert parties and singing in a falsetto voice’. He was also known to enjoy the company of Boy Scouts.
Powell marched his column of fighting men from the beaches of the Gold Coast into deep up-country, his task once again ‘to bring back the gold’ and to destroy the religious practices of the Ashanti. When they got to their destination, a town called Kumasi, the King of the Wogs was asked to produce 50,000 ounces of gold, and spare us the mumbo-jumbo. Only six hundred ounces were forthcoming, creating a bit of a letdown amongst the visitors, who were already half-dead from the march. Baden-Powell concluded that the King and his mother should be taken back to the coast in default.
No one in Kumasi liked the idea of this, because ‘The Queen Mother, as with many African peoples, was an extremely important figure in the hierarchy.’ Obviously a peculiar lot. Notwithstanding that, Baden-Powell and his boys set about the business of teaching these heathens a history lesson of the type untaught in British schools. In their rage for gold they battered their way through temples and sacred mausoleums, pillaging anything of value in an ‘orgy of destruction that horrified the Ashanti who witnessed it’.
With their royal family as prisoners, the Africans stood by ‘like a flock of sheep’. There was not much for the civilisers to do before bidding their farewells except to ‘set fire to the holiest buildings in town’. ‘The feeling against the niggers was very intense,’ wrote Powell, ‘and the whites intended to give them a lesson they would not forget.’29
Some of them haven’t.
The other side of the continent was of no less colonial interest, but here things weren’t going so well. All the ingredients of a major imperial cock-up were in situ, focusing on a city in the southern Sudan called Khartoum. The Sudan had been annexed by the British, but now they wanted out. On paper this looked relatively easy: bring in the camels, evacuate all the people on our side, get them back to Egypt, and we’ll sort out the details later.
George Eliot’s brilliant aphorism, ‘Consequences are without pity’ – or words to that effect – proved its fidelity here. Before anyone knew it, Khartoum was under a siege that was to last 317 days. An army of 30,000 religious fanatics under the messianic Mahdi, a sort of Osama bin Laden of his day, wanted to kill everyone in Khartoum and take the city back into the bosom of Mohammed. But unhappily, they faced the indomitable might of the British Empire, which in this case was one man. His name was Major General Charles George Gordon.
From time to time I agree with the dead, even with a reactionary conservative politician. After Gordon’s death amid the disaster of Khartoum, Sir Stafford Northcote got on his feet in the House of Commons and told nothing less than the truth. ‘General Gordon,’ he said, ‘was a hero among heroes.’ I find nothing to contradict that. Gordon was a hero, no messing with the word. ‘If you take,’ continued Northcote, ‘the case of this man, pursue him into privacy, investigate his heart and mind, you will find that he proposed to himself not any idea of wealth and power, or even fame,