The People’s William: Gladstone and the British century

An 1893 portrait of William Ewart Gladstone. Photo: Library of Congress

No British politician dominated the 19th century as much as William Ewart Gladstone, who sat in parliament for a mammoth 60 years, 12 of them as premier, and treasurer for another dozen years. It covered the period of Britain’s greatest power and influence as Gladstone moved from being a High Tory to become a reformist Liberal, earning the sobriquet “the People’s William”.

It was some turnaround for someone born in 1809 into great wealth. His father John Gladstone was a Scottish merchant, slave owner and Tory MP for Liverpool. The Demerara rebellion of 1823, the most significant slave uprising in the British Empire, started on Gladstone’s plantation. William was educated at Eton and Oxford where he graduated in 1831 with a double first in classics and mathematics. A year later he was invited to stand for the safe Tory seat of Newark and was elected to parliament. At Westminster he voted against the 1833 Factory Acts to regulate the hours of work and welfare of minors employed in cotton mills though he was a strong opponent of the opium trade. He sat in opposition as the Whigs dominated 1830s politics with the help of Daniel O’Connell‘s Irish votes and was re-elected in 1837 following the death of King William IV. Tory leader Robert Peel hoped to regain power aided by young MPs like Gladstone and newly elected Benjamin Disraeli. The Whigs clung on despite the crisis of Chartism but in the 1841 election Peel won power with a 90 seat majority. Peel made Gladstone vice president of the Board of Trade. He became president within 12 months, giving him a powerful position to indulge his appetite for statistics and numbers and he fitted in well with Peel’s administrative zeal. Thomas Carlyle called Gladstone “a most methodic, fair-spoken, purified, clear-starched, sincere looking man”.

With the expansion of the railway system in 1844 Gladstone proposed a bill that would allow the government to buy out any railway after 15 years. Peel counter-proposed a scheme to run cheap “third class” trains. The religiously conscientious Gladstone administered the plan but would not allow the cheap trains to run on Sundays because “the working respectable mechanic would not choose the Lord’s Day for travelling”. First and second class travellers were allowed to defy the Lord under the terms of the act.

In 1845 the potato crop failed across western Europe but Ireland was worst affected as its peasantry relied on it. Gladstone gloomily wrote to his wife. “Ireland! That cloud in the west! The coming storm! God grant that we may have courage to look them in the face.” As Ireland descended into famine, Peel repealed the Corn Laws hoping to reduce the price of bread but it upset many Tory land-owning grandees. The party split over the decision, bringing down the government. While Gladstone remained loyal to Peel and Disraeli sided with the Protectionists, the Whigs took office under Lord John Russell. Its response to famine was no better as Ireland descended into ill-fated revolution during the 1848 European springtime of the peoples.

In 1850 Peel was killed after falling off his horse. Gladstone said Peel had an authority matched by no other but his death had changed “the moral atmosphere” in parliament. Gladstone questioned his own political allegiance. He visited Rome in 1851 to understand European politics and in Naples he was horrified by conditions of its prisons. He brought it to the attention of the British press, the first manifestation of his moral earnestness and his passionate sense of purpose allied to an angry will for improvement.

In 1852 the Liberal government fell. Protectionist Tory leader the Earl of Derby briefly took power with Disraeli as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Though supported by some Peelites, free traders, and Irish MPs, it was an unstable minority government and Gladstone criticised it as frivolous and opportunistic. When Disraeli presented his first budget, Gladstone launched an angry attack. The budget was defeated on the floor, bringing down the government. With leading Whigs Russell and Palmerston at each other’s throat, Queen Victoria invited Peelite leader the earl of Aberdeen to form government with the support of Whigs. Gladstone replaced Disraeli as treasurer. His first budget in 1853 maintained income tax but abolished many duties. His five hour budget speech was the longest on record and answered “many vexed financial questions”. It was a time of prosperity and growth encouraged by Gladstone’s free trade principles.

In 1853 French emperor Napoleon III offered protection to Ottoman-controlled Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Tsar Nicholas I saw it as a threat and sent an ultimatum offering his own protection. The Ottomans got French and British support to declare war on Russia in 1853 and the Tsar attacked Wallachia and Moldavia. When the Russian fleet sank the Turkish Black Sea fleet at Sinope, British and French armies massed in the Crimea in early 1854. They routed the Russians at Alma, but at Balaklava, the British suffered severe losses in suicidal charges. The war became a siege on heavily fortified Sevastopol, where Times reporter William Howard Russell sent uncensored reports of chaos and inefficiency. The war dragged on, forcing Gladstone to increase military expenditure in his 1854 budget leading to a deficit. He increased income tax to avoid borrowing, calling war expenses “a moral check” that God imposed on “the ambition and lust of conquest”. Many were annoyed by his mix of piety and belligerence, especially when he was forced to introduce borrowing. He became an isolated figure in cabinet. The Aberdeen government resigned in 1855 and Lord Palmerston became prime minister. Palmerston ended the war after the British took Sevastopol in September, with thousands dead for little obvious benefit.

In 1855 Gladstone said political differences were greater within parties than between parties. Four years later he took part in a meeting where Whigs, Radicals and Peelites formed the Liberal Party. The new Liberal government’s first dilemma was the outbreak of civil war in America. Many in government supported the Confederates and not just because Lancashire cotton mills depended on its export. In a moment of what Peter Ackroyd called “mystic foolishness”, Gladstone said Jefferson Davis and the Confederate states had made an army and navy and “more than either, they have made a nation”. But prime minister Palmerston was wary of the north’s power and kept Britain neutral. Gladstone strengthened his position in parliament with cautious budgets which emphasised free trade and defence of empire. He supported electoral reform to include the disenfranchised industrial class but Palmerston was wary of that too.

Gladstone began to see the working class as his ally. In 1864 he proclaimed voting as a right not a privilege and said every man was “entitled to come within the pale of the Constitution”. Disraeli sneered that he sounded like Tom Paine. Palmerston also distanced himself with a Punch cartoon showing the prime minister as a race starter shouting “Too Soon!” to Gladstone as the only jockey on the course. Palmerston told a colleague that “Gladstone will soon have it all his own way and whenever he gets my place we shall have strange doings”.

Palmerston remained popular and he won another election in 1865 but he died on October 16, two days before his 81st birthday. The political reform that he bottled up suddenly escaped. Palmerston’s 71-year-old deputy Lord John Russell resumed the premiership in the fight against the Earl of Derby while Gladstone and Disraeli waited in the wings. Gladstone remained chancellor and leader in the House of Commons and he introduced a reform bill into the house. He became “the People’s William” for his work on the national economy, removing or reducing duties from hundreds of everyday items such as tea, sugar, rice, beer and spirits. His popularity reached new heights when he repealed duties on paper in his 1861 budget, removing a “taxation on knowledge”.

The Russell government was undone in 1866 by a financial collapse. The Tories took power under Derby and most people believed reform was doomed. Disraeli decided to beat Gladstone at his own game and proposed more radical changes to voting laws than the Liberals wanted. Disraeli pushed his plan through parliament, ignoring Gladstone, and nearly a million men were added to the electoral roll in perhaps the most unexpected revolution in English political history. Disraeli, now prime minister, shrewdly knew they would be mostly added in the cities and the Tory stranglehold on rural seats would continue.

The humiliated Gladstone considered leaving parliament but in 1867 Russell resigned as Liberal leader. Irish matters rose to the fore. After Fenian invasions of Canada in 1866 and a failed uprising in Ireland in 1867, the Fenians bombed Clerkenwell and killed a Manchester policeman. Gladstone won a parliamentary vote calling for the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, causing a general election, and Irish Catholic bishops instructed their flock to vote Liberal. Gladstone got a majority of 112. Gladstone said his mission was “to pacify Ireland” though he did not know much about the country and never visited it.

After passing the Irish Church Bill in 1869, he introduced an Irish Land Bill “of truly Gladstonian complexity” where tenants would be compensated for improvements or eviction. It passed the House of Lords because Disraeli did not strenuously object. But its complexity meant it did not get the result it wanted. Gladstone’s Education secretary William Forster oversaw a revolutionary act to outline a new national school system. The government introduced the secret ballot and a mine regulation act to improve industry safety while reforming local government, beginning a fully-fledged state bureaucracy. Gladstone forced through the changes despite a hostile House of Lords and a suspicious Queen Victoria but remained electorally popular until suddenly he wasn’t. At a Thanksgiving service in December 1871, the crowd greeted Gladstone coolly while Disraeli was widely applauded. A Liberal whip blamed “apathy and political discontent” and Disraeli prepared to pounce.

In 1873 Gladstone resigned as prime minister after his Irish University Bill was opposed by the Catholic Church and defeated on a second reading. Victoria asked Disraeli to become prime minister but he wanted to wait until he won an election so Gladstone had to continue. In January 1874 Gladstone dissolved parliament and made an election address promising to abolish income tax but the Tories won 350 seats to the Liberals 242. Disraeli was prime minister again and Gladstone retired to the back benches, with many Liberals glad to be rid of the old reformer as leader. Gladstone remained the party’s most formidable presence as Disraeli proved not as effective in government as he was in opposition.

The feud between Disraeli and Gladstone climaxed in 1876 when Bulgaria rose against Ottoman rulers in a war that claimed 12,000 Bulgarian lives. Newspapers printed stories of Turkish atrocities and Gladstone demanded an inquiry. Disraeli was less interested in humanitarian issues than in protecting British interests and refused to intervene. Gladstone’s pamphlet Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East sold 200,000 copies in a month and at mass meetings the crowd shouted “Lead us!” Disraeli and many in Gladstone’s own party feared he would drag England into a war between Russia and Turkey. Victoria called him that “half mad man”. Gladstone aligned with a new reformer Joseph Chamberlain, declaring that through them, the Liberals could become “an instrument of great work”. Russia invaded Turkey in 1877 and with its army at the gates of Constantinople, the Ottomans agreed a treaty at San Stefano to recognise a larger Bulgaria, which now threatened its neighbours. Disraeli hurriedly attended a Berlin conference where the borders were reset, but many in Britain did not like his pro-Turkish stance. Disraeli’s government also suffered from humiliating military losses at Kandahar, Afghanistan and Isandlwana in Zululand. Gladstone began a new election campaign with relish. His foreign policy speeches in the Midlothian campaign caused immense excitement though Victoria called it “unpatriotic ravings”. Disraeli’s government was further tarnished by the Irish land war of 1879 and the rise of charismatic leader Charles Stewart Parnell. The 71-year-old Gladstone comfortably won the March 1880 election.

Gladstone again set about pacifying Ireland but found it difficult to differentiate between Parnell’s politicking and the Land League’s campaign of agrarian violence. Gladstone’s 1881 Land Act enshrined the Three F’s: fair rent, free sale, and fixity of tenure but the British establishment could not concede Parnell’s political demand of home rule. The government simultaneously passed a coercion act to imprison anyone suspected of violence or intimidation. Parnell was arrested, becoming an Irish martyr. From his cell he agreed the secret Kilmainham Treaty with Gladstone where he was released from prison and would support the Land Act on condition Gladstone would protect Irish tenants in arrears. Irish Secretary William Forster resigned in protest. Within a few hours his replacement Lord Cavendish was assassinated in the Phoenix Park.

Gladstone’s popularity in England nosedived and took a further hit after General Gordon disobeyed orders and tried to retain Khartoum in the Sudan instead of evacuating it. As Gordon was besieged in late 1884, Gladstone refused calls for a relief force. When he finally relented the force arrived two days too late. The G.O.M. or Grand Old Man as Gladstone was fondly called, suddenly became M.O.G. the Murderer of Gordon. He resigned as prime minister in June 1885 when the Commons rejected his budget. Lord Salisbury became the new Tory prime minister. In the 1886 general election Parnell supported Salisbury and cut the Liberals lead to 86 votes – exactly the same number of Irish members elected. When Salisbury refused to countenance home rule, Parnell switched sides. Gladstone raised “the Hawarden kite” which appeared to be a statement supporting Irish home rule.

Over the next few months Gladstone drafted a home rule bill but 93 Liberals voted against him including Joseph Chamberlain, who founded a new group called Liberal Unionists. After the defeat parliament was dissolved. In an election a Tory and Liberal Unionist coalition gained a combined majority of 118 proving Irish home rule was as unpopular in England as it was popular in Ireland. Undeterred, Gladstone said he would not abandon the cause. But when Parnell was cited in a divorce case, it was the non-conformist Gladstone who urged him to resign. When Parnell refused, Gladstone went public. The Irish MPs were bitterly divided for and against Parnell, while the Tories under Lord Salisbury and his Irish secretary Arthur Balfour went hard on coercion.

With Gladstone well into his eighties, fellow Liberals wondered when he would finally stand aside. In February 1892 he returned from holidays in Biarritz but bewildered colleagues by talking “almost entirely of trees”. He refused talk of resigning and remained determined to lead the party to that year’s election. Though he did not gain a majority he gained the largest number of seats and ruled again with Irish nationalist support. He introduced his second home rule bill in 1893 and this time it carried the Commons by 43 votes. However the House of Lords voted against it 10 to one. Defeated by English indifference, Gladstone muttered, “I can do no more for Ireland.” He resigned as prime minister in March 1894, replaced by Lord Rosebery. Gladstone was deeply hurt by Victoria’s lack of congratulations on his service.

Gladstone retired to Hawarden in Cheshire where his preoccupation changed from Irish home rule to the prevalence of jingoism sweeping the press and the music halls. He kept a lifelong antipathy to imperial attitudes. But he was suffering from facial neuralgia which metamorphosed into cancer. He died on May 19, 1898, aged 88. In the spirit of the age his body was taken by London Underground to his funeral at Westminster Abbey, just as the Boer War broke out. For some, as Ackroyd wrote, Gladstone represented one of the last obstacles to the steady progress of the state, to others he was “one of the last memorials to a once resplendent nation”. The queen that so disliked him died three years later. She would have been horrified that the last ever Liberal prime minister David Lloyd George invoked the G.O.M.’s spirit in his 1910 People’s Budget to redistribute wealth, “carving the last few columns out of the Gladstonian quarry.” Gladstone would have been pleased that the hostile House of Lords could no longer prevent that outcome or prevent a third Irish Home Rule Bill from passing in 1912, though Irish Unionist and Tory resistance allied to world war kept the latter from becoming a reality.

In the 1990s Labour premier Tony Blair invoked comparisons with Gladstone for his similarly moralistic style of foreign policy. As David Marquand wrote, Gladstone staked his career on the proposition that the public interest outweighs private interest and the Gladstonian conscience was a reaction against economic attempts to force social relations into a market mould. Gladstone’s earnestness did not always impress. Writer Emily Eden wrote that “if he were soaked in boiling water and rinsed until he were twisted into a rope, I do not suppose a drop of fun would ooze out.” But the problems Gladstone identified in his later career such as the atrocities of ethnic cleansing and the struggle to affirm human rights remain as acute now as it was during the long era of the People’s William.

The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a global world

Joseph Conrad on arrival in New York on the S.S. Tuscania in 1923. Photo: Library of Congress

As Maya Jasanoff wrote in The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (2017), the difference between historians and fiction writers is that the former stop at the door to someone’s mind. Historians don’t go where the sources don’t lead. Novelists, however, “walk right in and roam freely through a person’s feelings, perceptions, and thoughts”. In his four great books The Secret Agent, Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Nostromo, Joseph Conrad argued fiction stood on firmer moral ground than document-based history, “being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena”. Conrad was primarily a sea writer (a label he hated), but he grappled with the ramifications of living in a global world, impacts of dislocation and multi-ethnic societies, and disruption from technological change.

On December 3, 1857 a baby boy was born in freezing Berdychiv, Ukraine. Apollo Korzeniowski gave his first-born son three names, Jozef for his mother’s father, Teodor for his father’s father, and Konrad, the name that everyone called him, a hero of Polish patriotic literature. Berdychiv was in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth which was swallowed up in the 18th century by powerful neighbours Prussia, Austria, and Russia. Apollo was a member of Poland’s faded “splachta” nobility and a political writer and dreamer who hoped to see Poland regain nationhood. His wife’s relations were more practical. Tadeusz Bobrowski made the best of a bad hand and became a relatively wealthy businessman. Tadeusz’s sister Ewa was a great beauty and only 16 when she met Apollo. He won her after eight years of assiduous attention. Tadeusz watched with contempt as Apollo failed to manage an estate and then worked as a writer pushing radical solutions to Poland’s ills. Apollo got involved in underground organisations when they moved to Warsaw in 1861. One night uniformed Tsarist men raided the house and arrested him on charges of conspiracy. A military tribunal found him guilty and exiled the family to Vologda, north-west Russia. Both parents suffered in the region’s terrible weather before authorities allowed them to move to Chernihiv, Ukraine. It was too late for Ewa. She died in 1865 leaving Apollo grief-stricken. Apollo sent seven-year-old Konrad to his uncle Tadeusz for a year before he collected him and moved to Lviv in Austrian Galicia then Krakow in Poland. Apollo got a job as a magazine but he too died in 1869, leaving Konrad an orphan at 11. Tadeusz tried to turn him into “a pragmatic Bobrowski, not a dreamy Korzeniowski” but, aged 16, Konrad shocked his uncle by saying he wanted to become a seaman. It was a logical move for a young man adrift all his life. He moved to Marseille with the help of emigrant Poles and joined the merchant marine where he learned the ropes in French. He loved the Mediterranean which he called “the cradle of sailing” but he quickly went through his allowance from Tadeusz and his Tsarist citizenship was a problem, as he needed approval from the Russian consul to sail according to French law. He moved to England in 1878 to work in the world’s largest merchant fleet. Konrad Korzeniowski became Joseph Conrad.

London stepped out of a Dickens’ novel and Conrad would later write his own Dickensian fiction based in the city, The Secret Agent (1906). In it French-born shopkeeper Verloc led a group of would-be revolutionaries and anarchists on the payroll of the Russian embassy. The embassy instructed Verloc to launch a senseless bombing attack at Greenwich to give Britain a “good scare”. The bomb went off early, killing its detonator, Verloc’s brother-in-law. When police found the dead man’s coat with identifying marks, Verloc’s wife Winnie confirms it was her brother. Verloc later admits his responsibility and his anguished wife fatally stabs him. She escaped but commits suicide by jumping off a Channel ferry. Though Conrad took inspiration from the Polish assassination of Tsar Alexander III in 1881, he claimed The Secret Agent was less about anarchism than it was a domestic drama about Winnie Verloc and it mapped contours of his own early life. Reviewers didn’t see it that way, noting parallels with Irish Fenians‘ dynamite campaign in England and London paranoia about anarchist activity.

In 1878 Conrad answered an ad for seamen in the Times and was assigned to the Duke of Sutherland bound for Australia. Aboard he learned to speak English and it was the first of a dozen British registered ships he would sail with, working his way from ordinary seaman to become captain. Conrad preferred sailing ships but steamships were taking over especially after the Suez Canal opened in 1869. Conrad came closest to defining his life at sea in his 1897 novella The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. As one character in it said, “ships are all right” but what counted was “the men in them”. Shipping remained dangerous and hundreds of sailors died annually in accidents amid woeful safety standards. In 1873 Liberal MP Samuel Plimsoll published a pamphlet attacking shippers for overloading, undermanning, and improperly maintaining their craft. Plimsoll’s Merchant Shipping Act of 1876 included the need for ships to carry a fixed load line, the “Plimsoll Line”. Not all Britons shared Plimsoll’s respect for seamen and stereotypes of drunken sailors abounded. Sailing did not pay well and attracted a rougher element and relied on foreign labour, called “Dutchmen” no matter where they came from. Trade unionists complained that foreigners took British jobs and putting downward pressure on wages. A parliamentary committee in 1894 folded issues of sufficient British sailors into the wider question of whether there was enough crew in the first place. One witness with 16 years experience in the British service told the committee his ships were sufficiently manned but had no questions about the make up of his crew. The witness was Mr J. Conrad Korzeniowski, now officially a captain after passing the Board of Trade’s qualifying exams. He had become “a Polish nobleman cased in British tar”. He was conscientious and won respect as being a “good sailor and trustworthy ship’s officer”.

As the age of sail receded, Conrad captured that fading way of life in his novels. His collection of maritime short stories The Mirror of the Sea (1906) was “a record of a phase, now nearly vanished”. His short story Youth was based on his 1881-83 service as second mate of the Palestine, his role portrayed by the thoroughly English Charles Marlow making the first of several appearances in Conrad’s fiction.

Conrad’s 1887 adventure on the Highland Forest almost ended in tragedy when spars cracked during a storm and one struck him hard on the back. He recuperated in a European hospital in Singapore, then a fast rising port turbo-charged by the Suez Canal, linking India, China and the Malay peninsula. Half of everything arriving in Singapore was put on board another craft for re-distribution. From here Conrad got a job on the British registered but Arab owned Vidar on a route to pirate-ridden waters of Borneo and Sulawesi. Dutch East Indies authorities accused the Vidar of gun-running and slave trading. Conrad denied the latter accusation but his fiction portrayed Malay society permeated by slavery alongside whites who appeared oblivious to it. When his Borneo-set book Almayer’s Folly came out, one reviewer said Conrad might become “the Kipling of the Malay Archipelago”. His greatest novel Lord Jim (1900) was also about a European sailor in Malay waters. Jim was chief mate aboard the Patna carrying Muslim pilgrims from Singapore to Mecca when it threatened to capsize in a storm. The captain and crew including Jim abandoned ship leaving the passengers to their own devices.

The story was based on the English-registered steamship Jeddah where the crew abandoned Mecca pilgrims in a storm in 1880 but the passengers rallied to pump the ship and sail to safety. As the Jeddah scandal reverberated to London, the captain was suspended for three years and first mate Williams was recommended to never be allowed to sail again. But Williams did sail again, in a steamship heading out of Singapore, Conrad’s own ship, the Vidar.

Conrad re-imagines Williams as Jim on the Patna, and again Charles Marlow tells the tale. Jim ran away after the tragedy and was imprisoned by a Bugis community before saving them from their enemies. As reward, they call him a title of honour, Tuan Jim or Lord Jim. An Englishman betrayed him before shooting the chief’s son. Jim accepts the blame and is shot dead in turn, becoming a martyr to “a shadowy ideal of conduct”. Lord Jim appeared during growing European and American colonialism and reviewers recognised the book’s remarkable originality. It was never a bestseller as readers were uneasy about Conrad’s rumination over values in crisis and the demise of a seafarer’s craft in an age of steam.

Conrad went to Brussels in 1889 where he heard about a venture to exploit Belgium’s new colony, the Congo Free State. Administered as a personal fiefdom of Belgian King Leopold II, Congo was bisected by the gigantic Congo River and the company ran steamboats along the river. One of the Congo steamboat captains was killed and Conrad accepted a job to replace him, though he’d heard most staff barely completed six months of service due to dysentery. He sailed to Africa while writing Almayer’s Folly.

Europeans were originally attracted to Congo looking for slaves and a new wave of travellers followed to establish “civilisation, commerce and Christianity”, as celebrated explorer-missionary David Livingstone put it. When Livingstone went missing, the New York Herald dispatched Henry Morton Stanley to find him. After tracking Livingstone to Lake Tanganyika, Stanley mapped the Congo River and his Through the Dark Continent became a bestseller. After failing to convince the British government to invest, Stanley turned to Leopold, who wanted to get involved in the European scramble for Africa. Leopold got approval to take over the Congo Free State at the 1884 Berlin Conference and he formed a committee ostensibly to peacefully build settlements and end slavery in Congo. Stanley got to work founding stations. But this was no philanthropic enterprise. Leopold disguised personal control through shell organisations and local chiefs gave away their land in unfair treaties. Slave labour turned Leopold’s dream into a nightmarish reality enforced at the barrel of a gun.

Conrad arrived at the Congo port of Boma near the Atlantic rivermouth. From here he had to climb the dangerous rapids on foot. His diary found its way into his literary indictment of the Congo Free State enterprise, Heart of Darkness. Everyone was distrusting and ill-tempered except for one cheery young Irishman named Roger Casement who worked as a railway building supervisor. Conrad had an unhealthy three-week march to Leopoldville (Kinshasa) helped by a team of 31 African “beasts of burden” porters. He saw lots of dead bodies and signs of violence. “Mosquitos. Frogs. Beastly. Glad to see the end of this stupid tramp,” he wrote. He arrived late at Leopoldville and was scolded for the delay by his new boss, whom he immediately disliked. Conrad boarded the Roi des Belges steamer as chief mate to learn the route to Stanley Falls. They pushed upriver against the current with frequent stops to cut wood for the boiler. His experience crept into the developing Almayer’s Folly as they passed “millions of trees, massive, immense, running up high”. They made 1000 miles to Stanley Falls in four weeks before the rapids prevented further travel. Stanley Falls was the epicentre of Congo’s ivory trade which was privately run and subject to high taxes. On the way back, Conrad helmed the ship while the captain was sick. In Leopoldville he wrote “everything here is repellent to me, men above all, and I am repellent to them too”. His promised job as captain evaporated and he was plagued with dysentery and depression. After five months he broke his three-year contract and left the Congo. His famous story about it would take another eight years to develop.

Conrad uses Marlow as his narrator once again in Heart of Darkness. Marlow’s goal is to fetch a rogue company agent. At the mouth of the “big river” Marlow sees labourers being worked to death to build a railway and he follows Conrad’s journey up the rapids, before a frustrating wait for months at the “central station”. He hears about Kurtz, a remarkable man who sends in more ivory than all the others combined but was now doing more harm than good with an “unsound method”. Marlow takes a ship deep into “the heart of darkness” where Kurtz ran a compound as “a savage lord” helped by local and European disciples. Marlow convinced him to go back with him but Kurtz was dying and with his last gasp forced out, “the horror, the horror”.

By the time it came out in 1902 the book’s portrayal of Congo as the heart of darkness had new resonance. State agents drafted people to work in an extensive system of forced labour. Leopold had seized more territory in savage fighting while increasing the taxes on “the fruits of the land”. Those fruits included a new lucrative rubber crop. John Boyd Dunlop’s 1888 invention of the pneumatic bicycle tyre contributed to massive global demand. Almost overnight, rubber became Congo’s biggest export. Rubber grew in the jungle but was difficult to extract and was slow, painful and dangerous work. District officers imposed quotas policed by the fearsome Force Publique. Armed sentries pushed collectors into the forests at gunpoint and failures to meet quotas and attempts to escape were punished by murder and by hacking off limbs. A young Anglo-French shipping agent named E.D. Morel raised the alarm forcing the British House of Commons to send a consul to gather evidence. That consul was Conrad’s old friend Roger Casement. Though Heart of Darkness described the pre-rubber experience in Congo, Casement contacted Conrad for support. But Conrad never joined Casement and Morel’s movement. “I am only a wretched novelist” he said, remembering his father’s Polish experience that idealistic crusades led only to an early grave.

In 1893 he was devastated by the news of the death of Tadeusz. “It seems as if everything has died in me,” Conrad wrote. But the experience inspired him to finish Almayer’s Folly: The Story of an Eastern River which Unwin published in 1894, dedicated to the memory of his uncle “T.B.” In 1896 he married working class Englishwoman Jessie George whom he first met two years earlier. Conrad admired her even temper, good humour, patience, and nurturing impulse. They rented a Breton coast stone cottage at Île-Grande and he taught her to sail. Jessie said it was an idyllic time until Conrad’s depression returned. The story An Outpost of Progress, based on Congo experiences, was his escape hatch. Their first son Alfred Borys was born in 1898 and Conrad found time to write Youth and The Rescue. But Congo continued to haunt him. The Outpost character Kayerts became Kurtz in Heart of Darkness.

In 1903 the Conrads moved to Pent Farm in Kent which Conrad sublet from fellow writer Ford Madox Ford. Here Conrad’s second son John was born. Here too he befriended Scottish writer, adventurer and politician Robert Cunninghame Graham, who acted as an older brother. He tapped into Graham’s gaucho experiences of South America for his own invention, the country of “Costaguana” in his new book Nostromo. The title came from the Italian words nostro uomo (“our man”) and the book features Italian immigrants and a Costaguanero miner of English descent, based on Graham. Written during the Boer War, the book was about aggressive imperialism. Conrad said it was a story of so-called progress but also of “the tearing of raw material of treasure from the earth”. It was also about the rise of the United States. Under president Theodore Roosevelt it was “speaking softly and carrying a big stick” with plans to build a canal under its new dependency of Panama. In Nostromo wealthy American industrialist Holroyd says “we shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not”. The British-minded Conrad did not look forward to this prospect. Nostromo was released in 1904 and it was recognised as a flawed work of genius. Conrad had created the world in miniature, one critic said.

The early 20th century was a time of global connectedness though a handful of western powers consolidated their rule over the world’s people. Black America intellectual W.E.B. du Bois warned that despite progress, “bigotry and prejudice” could repeat the world’s “awful history”. Ho Chi Minh and Mohandas Gandhi began to challenge inequities while Roger Casement abandoned British diplomacy to become an Irish Republican. Conrad’s experience of the world made him sceptical and cynical. He became a best selling author with Under Western Eyes (1910) though it was his last great work.

He took his family to Poland in the summer of 1914 and was caught out when Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, triggering the First World War. The Conrads joined displaced refugees and Conrad’s American publisher had to ask the US ambassador in Vienna to issue exit papers. From Austria they crossed into Italy, passing a frontier guarded by German soldiers. In Genoa they caught a Dutch mail boat back to England, four months after their odyssey began. The war accentuated Conrad’s Englishness and he refused to add his name to a petition against Casement’s 1916 death sentence for treason. Conrad’s son Borys signed up for the war, sending letters home from the Western Front, before being gassed and badly injured in the conflict’s final days. Conrad accepted an assignment to write propaganda pieces for the Admiralty.

After the war he delighted in Wilson’s Fourteen Points which called for an independent Poland but he worried about the threat of Bolshevism. Conrad’s work was studied at universities, especially in America where he was hailed as “the greatest living writer in the English language”. He arrived in New York in 1923 as a celebrity, mobbed by journalists and lionised by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Overcome by enthusiastic Americans, Conrad was glad to return to England. In 1924 he settled with his family near Canterbury and worked on a novel he called Suspense set in Italy during the Napoleonic wars. On August 4, he was recovering from a bout of indigestion in his bedroom when the family downstairs heard a thump. Conrad had fallen dead from his chair. He was 66 years old. He was buried at Canterbury’s Catholic church. Graham left his friend with “his sail all duly furled, rope flemished down, and with the anchor holding truly in the kind Kentish earth”.

Conrad was barely mourned in Britain and Graham had difficulty finding a place to publish his obituary. But his heirs were global. William Faulkner, Andre Gide, and Thomas Mann were all inspired by him. Ernest Hemingway read Conrad “like a drunkard” and T.S. Eliot used his line “Mistah Kurtz—he dead” as an epigraph for his 1925 poem The Hollow Men.

As Jasanoff notes, Conrad’s insistence on the universal potential for savagery and the hollowness of civilisation explains why Heart of Darkness was so adaptable. In Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola relocated the story to America’s 1960s war in South-East Asia, As Patrick Galloway wrote, the idea of a company man turned savage, and of a brilliant and successful team-player groomed for greater things suddenly gone native, is perfectly realised in novella and film. Conrad’s horror reverberates long past dawn.

God’s executioner: Oliver Cromwell in Ireland

Samuel Cooper’s painting of Oliver Cromwell. Photo: National Library of Ireland

Few Englishmen have a reputation as jarring as that of Oliver Cromwell. At home he is revered. The BBC named him in the ten greatest Britons of all time while a Nottingham University academic says Cromwell was Britain’s greatest ever general. However across the water in Ireland, Cromwell is reviled as a genocidal tyrant, wished, as The Pogues sang, “A curse upon you Oliver Cromwell. You who raped our Motherland.” The contrast between his Irish and English reputations is shown in two books Peter Ackroyd’s The History of England Vol III: Civil War (2014) and Micheál Ó Siochrú’s God’s executioner : Oliver Cromwell and the conquest of Ireland (2008). Ackroyd introduces Cromwell with a photo describing him as the “chief of men” until his death in 1858. Cromwell was not necessarily anti-Irish but he was stridently anti-Catholic.

Cromwell first appeared as the MP for Huntingdon at the 1628 parliament. Here, King Charles I had to accept the Petition of Right to stop royal abuses and consent to no taxation without consent (a cry the Americans would adapt against the British parliament) marking a significant clash over royal power. Charles started “personal rule” as an absolute monarch clamping down on the growing power of English puritans with the help of his Catholic wife Henrietta Maria of France and his high-church Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud. Cromwell, who became a committed Puritan after a religious awakening in the 1830s, complained that Laud was “bringing on us a company of poisonous popish ceremonies”. By the end of that decade the Calvinist Scottish covenanters rebelled against Charles’s rule. Desperate for funds to fight his wars, Charles recalled parliament. Parliamentarians led by John Pym, angered at being ignored for so long, supported the Scottish rebels. Pym outlined his idea of restoring parliamentary privilege and a radical new theory of government that denied the divine right of kings. Cromwell supported Pym, according to one observer, “his countenance swollen and reddish, his voice sharp and untunable and his eloquence full of fervour”. Parliament refused requests for funding. Instead it was rumoured that Pym drew up a treaty with the Scots. The furious Charles immediately dissolved parliament. Londoners blamed the king for the impasse but unwilling to face charges of treason took out their anger on Archbishop Laud’s “popish plots”. The Scots were heartened and invaded England in July 1640. At Newburn they inflicted the biggest defeat on an English army in 300 years, and they took Newcastle and Durham. Charles was forced to sign the Treaty of Ripon with the Scots and recalled parliament in November. Charles’s supporters accused Pym of treasonable support for Scotland while puritans worried Charles would use his Irish army to clamp down on England. Parliament struck first. They impeached Laud in December 1640 and he was held in the Tower of London until his execution in 1645. In 1641 Thomas Wentworth, former Lord Deputy of Ireland was arrested and executed for his role in raising an Irish army to fight the Scots.

Charles was forced to sign a bill demanding three year parliaments. Then came a rebellion in Ireland. England had ruled Ireland since Norman times, but the native Irish regained some control in the medieval era and it was not until the end of the Tudor era that England controlled all the country. In 1641 Ireland remained a patchwork of competing religious and ethnic groups all angry with Wentworth’s arbitrary power with Charles’s support. When Wentworth was recalled, dispossessed Northern Irish Catholics used the turmoil in England to plot an armed rising under Phelim O’Neill. O’Neill pretended loyalty to Charles against the rule of the English parliament. He defeated government troops at Julianstown, then laid siege to nearby Drogheda. Atrocities took place against Protestants, giving Cromwell a later propaganda excuse to lay waste.

Believing O’Neill was loyal to the king, Ireland’s Old English Catholic aristocracy joined his rebellion. The combined forces called themselves the Catholic Army, marching into battle under a green flag with the text Long Live King Charles. Renowned general Owen Roe O’Neill (a kinsman of Phelim) returned from Europe to fight for the cause. Their movement spread across Ireland until 10,000 Scottish covenanters established control over north-east Ulster. English pamphlets fanned hysteria with disinformation about the scale of the Papist attacks. Parliamentarians believed the propaganda that Irish rebels massacred Protestants and planned to seize all Protestant-owned land. Cromwell pushed through an act to ensure that rebel-owned land would be collateral to pay an invasion army. Parliamentary reinforcements arrived in April 1642 and pushed O’Neill’s army back to Ulster. In October the rebels formed an Irish Confederation in Kilkenny with a general assembly to decide war strategy while a supreme council took day-to-day rule. In 1643 the Confederates and Royalists agreed on a truce which enabled Irish Protestant Lord Lieutenant Duke of Ormond to send forces to help Charles in England.

Knowing that bigger battles lay ahead in England, parliament was reluctant to muster a large army to fight in Ireland. Charles moved against Pym but Londoners protected him. The king and parliament were at war and there was an indecisive battle at Edgehill in Warwickshire. Charles used Oxford as a base to attack London. Both sides claimed victories in 1643 but Cromwell won a significant battle at Grantham despite being outnumbered. “With this handful it pleased God to cast the scale,” Cromwell said. Parliament suffered a blow with Pym’s death from cancer and Charles convened an opposition parliament at Oxford. The Scots sent 20,000 soldiers to defend the common Protestant cause of the parliamentarians. A new committee was established to manage the war with Cromwell on it.

In June 1644 the largest ever battle on British soil was fought at Marston Moor. Cromwell led the parliamentary army to a huge victory, establishing his reputation as its leading general. He wanted to drive the war on to conclusion though many parliamentarians wanted to strike a deal with Charles and were not as zealous as he was. The Earl of Manchester prevaricated at the battle of Newbury because he disliked fanatics like Cromwell and feared they would all be hanged as traitors. Cromwell replied, “if this be so why did we take up arms at first?” Cromwell attacked the ditherers saying only a clear victory over Charles would decide the issue. He arranged for aristocratic backsliders to be removed from command and demanded better discipline from what became known as the New Model Army. New muskets, swords and pistols were manufactured and the army got new red coats, becoming the standard English army uniform for the next 200 years. In June 1645 the two armies fought at Naseby, Leicestershire where Charles suffered a devastating defeat. Cromwell received the plaudits.

In Ireland there was tensions between royalists and a clerical faction that demanded full restoration of Catholic rights, especially when Pope Innocent X sent papal nuncio Giovanni Rinuccini to Ireland in 1645. Rinuccini opposed any treaty that did not contain religious concessions. Talks with Ormond stalled and Protestant leader in Cork, Murrough O’Brien, Lord Inchiquin, declared for parliament.

With little support from Ireland, Bristol fell to the parliamentarians. Charles fled to Scotland and tried to do a deal with the covenanters. They took him prisoner to win demands from parliament and surrendered him to the English for £400,000 ransom. A compromise Heads of Proposal was drafted up for the king’s agreement. Though it abolished some of his power he would remain sovereign, but Charles dismissed it out of hand. Cromwell rode at the head of the New Model Army which marched into London and purged the parliament of remaining royal supporters. The King escaped to the Isle of Wight where the governor interned him at Carisbrooke Castle. While Charles negotiated again with the Scots, the rump parliament voted not to deal with him further. Cromwell defeated a Scottish army at Preston. His army was now the master of the kingdom not parliament. Charles was taken to London for trial accused of becoming a tyrant, a decision parliament passed despite opposition from the House of Lords. On January 27, 1649 Westminster judges sentenced him to death. He was executed as a traitor three days later. The rump parliament declared the monarchy “unnecessary”, abolished the House of Lords and eventually declared a republic. Cromwell was the presiding officer of a council of state.

His chief item of business was now to subdue Ireland. Ormond agreed peace with the Confederates in 1646 while Owen Roe O’Neill defeated covenanters at Benburb. While too late to help England, Ormond hoped the treaty would force concessions with parliament. Rinuccini undermined this with a coup d’etat in Kilkenny but his orders for O’Neill to attack Ormond in Dublin did not succeed due to winter conditions. In 1647 parliament sent a force to help Inchiquin in Cork who took Cashel with great loss of life. But a year later Inchiquin changed his mind and declared for Charles. Ormond surrendered Dublin to parliamentary forces which massacred O’Neill’s army at Dungan Hill. Rinuccini suspected the Protestant Ormond’s motives and Ireland was in its own civil war in 1648.

After Charles’s execution, Ormond signed a treaty with Confederate Catholics which proclaimed the king’s 18-year-old son as Charles II. Rinuccini could only excommunicate Catholics who joined with Ormond. His departure to Rome allowed Ormond to make peace with Owen Roe O’Neill. English royalist soldiers came over to fight for this new uneasy alliance. Commonwealth ships blockaded a small royalist Navy at Kinsale and in June Ormond’s army suffered a devastating defeat at Rathmines outside Dublin. Cromwell described the battle as an “astonishing mercy”.

Cromwell arrived in Ireland in August with 20,000 men and a parliamentary-funded war chest which allowed him to buy food and regularly pay his men, promising reward for those who fought against the “barbarous and blood-thirsty Irish”. Cromwell did not fight battles but besieged towns, beginning with Drogheda, 30 miles north of Dublin. After the town’s royalist governor refused to surrender, Cromwell’s artillery breached Drogheda walls before his men stormed the town, killing 3000 defenders including many civilians and clerics. Cromwell called it “a righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretched who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood”. Cromwell biographer Thomas Carlyle would later claim that a Cromwell statement that “many inhabitants” had died was a later addition but there is no reason to doubt it. The severity set a benchmark for what was to follow.

Cromwell’s severe tactics unnerved opponents and Dundalk, Newry and Carlingford fell without a fight. He then marched with 9000 troops 100 miles south to Wexford where a large privateering fleet targeted English shipping. The English navy captured Rosslare Fort which the Royalists had abandoned, giving them control of the harbour entrance. Cromwell demanded Wexford’s surrender but defenders played for time with negotiation requests Cromwell found irksome. On October 10 his artillery opened fire. While negotiations over surrender continued, many residents panicked and fled the town allowing Cromwell’s men to scale the breached walls. The garrison rallied at the market place but their spirited resistance was futile. Cromwell wrote that his men “put to the sword all that came in their way”. He estimated 2000 soldier and civilian casualties, though unlike at Drogheda he personally did not take part.

Cromwell’s savage reputation preceded him when he tried to take Duncannon Fort on Waterford Harbour and it stiffened the resolve of defenders who realised there was no advantage in surrendering. Cromwell also had harder work taking Waterford, which held out for months. The city supported Rinuccini over Ormond but recognised that Cromwell now posed the biggest threat. After appalling weather and determined resistance, Cromwell abandoned the siege of Waterford in December, moving into winter quarters in parliamentary-supporting Cork. The Irish cause was badly weakened by the death of its best soldier, Owen Roe O’Neill, aged 64, his body ravaged by years of war in Ireland and Europe.

Cromwell regrouped his forces in January 1650. He condemned the Irish bishops who met at Clonmacnoise and called for unity and resistance against the invaders. Cromwell said the Irish began the war unprovoked and put the English to “barbarous massacre”. With renewed war threatened in Scotland after Charles allied with covenanters, Parliament ordered Cromwell’s recall to England. He ignored it for three months. He left Youghal for Fethard, Tipperary where the town commander surrendered on generous terms. On hearing the news, Cashel’s defenders fled. Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton took Callan and menaced Kilkenny while Lord Broghill led a third flank to the west. Ormond was powerless to deal with the three prongs and he was furious when Cahir defenders disobeyed orders and surrendered. After a five day assault with heavy losses on both sides, Cromwell took Kilkenny. With Ormond prioritising Limerick, Clonmel was the next domino to fall, though Cromwell had 2000 losses, his largest casualty figure in his fighting in England, Scotland and Ireland. Though he took the town, Clonmel shattered his myth of invincibility more than any other Irish engagement.

He went back to England with the war ongoing. Poet Andrew Marvell wrote An Horatian Ode on Cromwell’s Return from Ireland. “And now the Irish are ashamed / To see themselves in one year tamed”. While Cromwell fought Charles’s army in Scotland, Ireton led the field in Ireland amply supported by sufficient men, equipment and cash. Waterford surrendered to Ireton in August as did Duncannon, leaving Limerick and the Catholic Ulick Bourke, Marquis of Clanricarde, in charge of Galway. Catholic bishops blamed Ormond and demanded he resign and leave Ireland under Clanricarde’s command. After Clanricarde’s defeat at Meelick on the Shannon, Ormond left Ireland, having never won the respect of Irish Protestants while being distrusted by Catholics. Clanricarde now commanded 30,000 men but they were scattered across the country, and demoralised about Clanricarde’s own poor performance in the field. Ireland’s main hope was support from the Catholic Duke of Lorraine, their only significant foreign ally. The Irish abroad promised Lorraine the Protectorship of Ireland in return for financial and military support. Clanricarde renounced the agreement saying it was not authorised by Charles Stuart and a desperate Limerick surrendered in October 1651. Clanricarde’s repudiation affected his relationship with the people of Galway and the city’s fall in May 1652 marked the end of organised Confederate resistance.

Though Irish “Tories” (from the word tóraigh meaning to hunt or pursue) conducted a guerrilla campaign for another two years, Cromwell defeated the royalist revolt in Scotland with a crushing victory at Dunbar. Cromwell’s position as the first man of the state was cemented with the award of Hampton Court palace. The Catholics of Ireland were stripped of their land in the 1652 Act of Settlement if they had actively supported the rebellion. There were hundreds of war trials including Phelim O’Neill’s, who had started the rebellion in 1641 and was executed. In 1653 Cromwell became dictator, dissolving the long parliament and working around it to re-build a shattered government. Cromwell ordered Irish landholders to move west of the Shannon by 1654 where they would receive some compensation for lost lands. But the expected influx of English settlers did not eventuate and many soldiers sold their lands to allow major Protestant landholders to consolidate their estate, forming a new Protestant ascendancy.

Cromwell’s family took the trappings of royalty with his sons considered princes in waiting. Pressed to become a monarch, Cromwell said he could not discharge his duties “under that title”. There would be no King Oliver I but in 1657 he was appointed Lord Protector. The post was not hereditary but he had the power to name his successor. Before his death in 1658 he nominated eldest son Richard to become next Lord Protector. But armies were on the march again in 1660. Amid the chaos, parliament negotiated with Charles Stuart to become king. Charles II returned to London in triumph in May and he offered to indemnify old enemies except those who signed his father’s death warrant. Richard Cromwell fled to Europe while his father’s body was exhumed and posthumously executed. Irish Protestant royalists like Ormond and Inchiquin regained their lands but the Catholics remained dispossessed and angry, their share of land ownership reduced from 60pc in 1641 to 20pc by 1660. Almost a fifth of the population had died in the wars, creating a bitter and lasting legacy. Though Cromwell’s English reputation was rescued by Thomas Carlyle in the 1840s, Irish MPs fiercely resisted the idea of a statue to him in the 1890s. Irish Protestants have ambivalent feelings about him, uncomfortable about his regicide and they prefer to commemorate William of Orange instead. For many Catholics Cromwell remains a figure of hate and guilty of crimes against humanity. Ireland brought out the worst in Cromwell and a lethal combination of racial superiority and religious bigotry created the ideal conditions for his campaign of terror. As commander-in-chief he bore responsibility for the excesses of his army while the harsh post-war settlement was also his doing. Ó Siochrú said Cromwell was no monster but committed monstrous acts. “As a warrior of Christ, like the medieval Crusaders, he acted as God’s executioner, exacting revenge and crushing all opposition, convinced throughout of the legitimacy of his cause and striving to build a better world for the chosen few,” he concluded.