Queen Victoria’s Revenge: Storming the Citadel (Part 2)

The Rest Is History

This episode concludes the dramatic story of Britain's 1868 expedition to rescue European hostages held by Emperor Tewodros II in Abyssinia'

Key takeaways

• The British Empire's intervention was driven by imperial pride and fear of humiliation in front of its colonial subjects.
• General Napier's engineering expertise and methodical approach were critical to the expedition's success despite past military failures.

Main topics

• British military expedition to Abyssinia
• Emperor Tewodros II's mental state and isolation

Notable quotes

"The hour of your deliverance is at hand." – Emperor Tewodros II, to a captive hostage.

Conclusion

The British expedition to Magdala succeeded through meticulous planning and Napier's leadership,

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:11) A commotion at the doorway brought me back to life, trying to start up and failing thanks to the weight of those infernal clanking manacles. As the door crashed shut again, I was aware of a swaying figure in the middle of the room, bare to the waist. How are you? How are you, my dear friend? My best of friends, cries this apparition, whooping with laughter. Thank God I am well. Are you well? Ah, my good friend, my heart rejoices to see you, for the friendship I have entertained for you has not diminished. Be of good cheer, for though you are bound with fetters of Samson and Zedekiah were bound even Speaker 4 (0:57) with fetters of brass, yet, Speaker 3 (0:59) yet. Speaker 3 (1:02) His voice trailed away, muttering, And who else? Yes, Joachim also was bound, and Manasseh. They were bound by the power of God, and so was Joseph, who was sold for a servant, whose feet they hurt with fetters, and he was laid in iron. And then he gave another crazy laugh and almost fell over. But have no fear, for the hour of your deliverance is at hand. My eyes had recovered from the lamp glare, but I could hardly believe them, for the newcomer was Theodore, king of Abyssinia, and he was staggeringly drunk. That was the great Victorian hero Sir Harry Flashman remembering his first meeting with the Emperor Teodros II in his memoir Flashman on the March. It is, to reiterate, a novel, not a work of history, but it is very, very deeply rooted in all the historical records. And in the book, Flashman has been sent on a secret mission to recruit allies against the Abyssinian Emperor Teodros II. as part of a British expedition to rescue several dozen European hostages. And even though Flashman's Part of It, as we've said, is invented, all the most jaw-dropping parts of the story in the novel, Teodorus, his mountain lair, the British expedition, are absolutely true. And today we have reached the melodramatic climax of the story. And Dominic, this is ultimately, it's... A British imperial version of the Iranian hostage crisis, isn't it? Yes. And if only Jimmy Carter had paid attention to the lesson that could have been learned from our glorious boys in 1868, the way that they solved the problem of hostages Speaker 4 (3:05) in the hands of an unfriendly regime. So true, Tom. I'm not sure his knowledge of Victorian imperial history is as good as it should be. one of the flaws. He spent too much time fighting rabbits. The key, as far Speaker 3 (3:17) as I can tell, is to involve railways and elephants. Elephants. Which Speaker 4 (3:22) may be where Carter went wrong. Definitely. So let's remind people where and when we are. Summer of 1867. So for four years or so, this crisis has been rumbling on in the mountain kingdom of Abyssinia. And at the root is the Emperor Theodosius' simmering rage at the fact that Queen Victoria has not been answering his letters. And he has taken a group of Europeans hostage, so most of the missionaries, but also to remind people, the British consul, Captain Charles Duncan Cameron, and the Foreign Office's agent, Hormuz Rassam. And he's holding them in his mountaintop lair, his citadel of Magdala. And the hostages have been smuggling out these increasingly desperate messages, reporting that Teodros is descending into insanity and basically begging the Foreign Office to use force. And last time he ended with Lord Derby's Conservative government sending an ultimatum to Abyssinia, giving Teodros three months to release them. So let's pick up the story on the 19th of August in London. We are at 10 Downing Street and chairing the cabinet is Lord Derby. And Lord Derby is a proper Victorian grandee, formerly a Whig, now a Conservative, incredibly rich. He has coal mines in Lancashire. He is classically educated. He's a brilliant debater. He's a man who likes shooting and horse racing. He's sort of Victorian politics bingo. And he runs the country in cahoots with his sort of ally in the commons, Benjamin Disraeli. He was the longest serving Speaker 3 (4:57) Conservative political leader ever. 22 years. He was prime minister multiple times, but only for very short spells. Yeah. And he never had a majority. Speaker 4 (5:06) No. And he relied, I mean, he's in the Lords and he relied on Disraeli to run things in the Commons. Anyway, they meet his cabinet and they agree this cannot stand. As British governments always do, they blame their predecessors, the liberals, and they say the liberals should have sorted this out. However, they didn't. And here we are. And we are being embarrassed in the eyes of the world. In particular, we're being embarrassed in the eyes of our subjects in India and in South Arabia and places like Aden. And we cannot lose face in front of these people. We cannot be humiliated by an African king. So, Lord Darby's ministers have already been in touch with officials in Bombay to discuss an intervention plan. The army in India has been put on alert. And they've agreed that the British authorities in India will meet all the costs. An important point, although they do, as Flashman and his interlocutor were discussing in our first episode, they do end up putting a penny on income tax to pay for it all. British governments love raising spending to fund defence, Speaker 3 (6:09) don't Speaker 4 (6:09) they? They do. Well, there's a lesson here for Andy Burnham, I think. Anyway, they've also appointed a guy who will run the expedition. And this is the veteran British commander-in-chief in Bombay. who was Lieutenant General Sir Robert Napier of the Royal Engineers. He's a tremendous man. Napier is a tremendous man, actually. He's one of the stars of the British Army, and he's one of those, in an age when British commanders actually quite often turn out to be unbelievably useless buffoons. He is not a buffoon. He's not a buffoon at all. He was born in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, into an army family. He'd fought in two wars against the Sikhs. He'd commanded the defence of Lucknow in the Indian... mutiny. He'd led troops into Beijing in the Second Opium War. He's incredibly popular with his men. Everyone agrees that Napier is a charming, polite, brave, level-headed, very methodical commander who doesn't like wasting the lives of his men. He looks as he should. He's a big man. He's got this incredibly kind of weather-beaten face, and he's got this very large but also slightly sad melancholy moustache, which again, I think is in keeping. But not an ineffectual man, because he's an engineer, Speaker 3 (7:25) isn't he? Speaker 4 (7:25) Yes, exactly. Speaker 3 (7:27) He gets things done. He gets things built. He doesn't faff around. Yeah. And that's key Speaker 4 (7:32) to this whole story, really, I guess. Our American listeners will perhaps welcome a comparison with Ulysses S. Grant, who's been distinguishing himself at this time. Though he's not as corrupt as Ulysses S. Grant. Not, of course. And not as boring. So I think American listeners always enjoy it when we make those points. He's 57. His wife, his beloved wife, to whom he's been very happily married, has just died. And so Napier has ventured again into the lists. And he's just got married to an 18-year-old. Well, I don't know what to say about that. What do you make of that? Well, Speaker 3 (8:06) I'm waiting for you to say the salient fact about this woman. What is the salient fact? She's from Montgomeryshire. She's Welsh. Speaker 4 (8:14) Oh my word. How did I overlook that? So yet another series about Welsh history. Oh, mad that I missed that. My apologies go to the people of Wales for missing that important detail. Yeah, you're just blanking Welsh history Speaker 3 (8:27) again, Dominic. Can I tell you one other amazing thing? Do you know when she died? 1944. Very close, 1930. Wow. Aged 89. That's bonkers, isn't it? That Speaker 4 (8:39) she lived so long. It is, isn't Speaker 3 (8:42) it? Speaker 4 (8:42) She lived long enough to listen to jazz and to go to the cinema to see King Kong. She lived a long time. She saw the jazz singer. She did. That's what killed her. Speaker 2 (8:52) Yes. Speaker 4 (8:52) All right. So Napier. This is quite a tough gig for Napier. Now, you may think, are the Europeans against an African kingdom? It'll be a walkover. Not a bit of it. The history of European intervention in these years does not give great grounds for confidence. So the most... Famous or infamous British intervention of recent years was probably Afghanistan, the first Anglo-Afghan war. The retreat from Kabul in 1842, an absolute shambles, tens of thousands of British casualties, an utter humiliation. Flashman's first adventure. Flashman's first adventure. Flashman then pitched up in the Crimea in the mid-1850s. Now there, of course, Britain technically won, but the British and French between them lost more than 100,000 men. The campaign was notorious for disease, terrible conditions, kind of industrial slaughter, very miserable. And we will be talking about this in a month or so. We will indeed. While this Abyssinian crisis has been brewing, the world's attention has been on Mexico, where the French had intervened with their puppet emperor Maximilian Habsburg, friend of the show, and the French had lost almost 10,000 men. And again, they had been defeated. Speaker 4 (10:07) European interventions in this period have a pretty checkered record. And people say at the time, this is going to be the hardest yet. The Abyssinian interior is not properly mapped. It's mountains. It's gorges. It could not be more challenging. Intel is absolutely useless. The climate is punishingly hot. There's cholera. There's typhoid. There's lions. There's snakes. Baboons. Baboons. Everything could go wrong. In Bombay, Napier's officers prepare by going to every library in Bombay and scouring every single history and travel book they can find for references to Abyssinia. And then they write a report and the report concludes, there are few countries about which we know less. That's reassuring. So to give you some examples of what they don't know, they don't really know where Teodros is. They don't know how much support he has. They don't have any relations whatsoever with the local warlords, the people who are rebelling against him. They don't have any sense of which way they will jump. They don't know where to land. They don't know what route to take to Magdala. And they don't know how they're going to get out again without being attacked. But as you said, Napier is an engineer. Yeah. Speaker 3 (11:13) So Speaker 4 (11:14) he is the perfect man for the job, really. He plans this really methodically. And he says, all right, let's work backwards. What we would need, we'd need 5,000 men. to get these people out. And what would those 5,000 men need? They would need supply lines stretching back to the coast, stretching for hundreds of miles. So we'll need another 10,000 men to guard the supply lines. Then we'll need a coastal base. And we ideally want two connections, one going up the Red Sea to Suez and another going across the Indian Ocean to Bombay. And to plan all this, we're going to... draw on the resources of the entire British Empire. So as Philip Marsden says in his book, The Barefoot Emperor, from Liverpool to Woolwich, Chatham to Bombay. Chatham, that was a little gift to you. Oh, great. So this is really another story about Chatham High Street. Aden to Madras. Quartermasters and storekeepers, technicians and chemists, coolies and cooks, design clerks, bookkeepers and stevedores began to work towards freeing the captives from the grip of what the newspapers called the Gorilla King. And they go into incredible detail. Marston's book is brilliant on this. They work out, you know, to the sort of last pound, exactly how much salt beef, salt pork they'll need, how much vinegar and mustard, how much rum and champagne and beer. Champagne. They take champagne with them. That's essential, isn't it? Of course they do. You can't fight a war in Abyssinia without plentiful supplies of champagne. They stockpiled Bibles and prayer books and pickaxes and gunpowder. And one of the things they stockpiled, very tellingly, copper telegraph wire. So this is going to be, it's described at the time as a campaign to rival the adventures of Alexander the Great or Hernan Cortes or Pizarro or whatever. But this is going to be the most technologically advanced military campaign in history. So Napier is taking seven photographers. He's taking a portable telegraph system. He's taking all kinds of water pumps and things. He's taking flares to light up the camp in case they're attacked at night. So it's kind of the great exhibition on manoeuvres. Yeah, the touring great exhibition. Like Napoleon in Egypt, he's taking, Napoleon called them, they called them savants in the French campaign. So he's got geographers and meteorologists. He's got a boat from the Bombay Zoological Society. He's got a geologist from Calcutta. He's got a British Museum archaeologist who's coming along to kind of check for relics. And the press are with them. So we mentioned in the first episode, Henry Morton Stanley of the New York Herald, G.A. Henty of the Standard, which is a London paper. So they've got all that. They also are going to take a lot of cash. And this is an incredible story. They will need cash to buy supplies when they get to Abyssinia and also to pay off the local warlords. And British agents in Africa report, they say, well, that neck of the woods in East Africa, there's only one. commonly accepted universal currency. And this is, believe it or not, the Austrian silver tala, which was minted first by Maria Theresa in 1741. How come it's so popular in Abyssinia? This I have been unable to determine. Seems improbable. So apparently the silver tala that they wanted most was the 1780 edition. I don't know why, but this was the one that was regarded as the, I was about to say the gold standard, the silver standard. that was very popular in East Africa. And mind-bogglingly, people were still using this as currency in the 1950s. Goodness. These Maria Theresa silver coins. And for some reason, they have just become entrenched and accepted in East Africa. But they're no longer making them in Vienna. And Napier's agents, first of all, Napier sends agents to Central Europe to buy up as many of these old coins as they can. And then he sends a representative to the official mint in Vienna to persuade them. He says, the British will supply you with silver. And can you produce these talas? And the official mint in Vienna is turning out 20,000 of these a week purely for the expeditionary force. God, amazing. So all this takes a lot of money. Derbe's government has set a budget of 2 million pounds. Even before they set off, it balloons to 4 million. And it ends up costing the British taxpayer £10 million. So when you do the calculation, that is the equivalent of tens of billions of pounds today. This was an extremely expensive enterprise by the standards of the day. Speaker 3 (16:00) Can I just ask, this is a surgical strike. They have no plans to occupy Abyssinia or anything like that. It's in and out. Speaker 4 (16:07) No talk of regime change, no talk of anything but the hostages. And Speaker 3 (16:12) secondly... They are doing this ultimately, you think, not for humanitarian reasons, but to affirm the prestige of the British Empire in the face of the Ottomans, the French. Speaker 4 (16:25) That's ultimately the reason. Yes. I think it's hard to distinguish those two things. And I think people at the time would have found it very hard to distinguish them. In the same way, let's go back to the comparison with Iran in 1980, the response to the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis. The plight of the hostages in that story became tear-jerking. It was in American newspapers and bulletins all the time. But it is also about prestige. But in the minds of the policymakers, it's inseparable, really, I guess. Yeah. And from the question of prestige, and I think the same is true here, ultimately, I think they don't care that much about the hostages, about some missionaries. I mean, it's brilliant for the press, right? The press care. Yeah. But I think if you're Lord Derby or Benjamin Disraeli, you care far more about British prestige. Britain cannot afford to be humiliated. Because it is billions, billions and billions in today's spending. Speaker 3 (17:16) Yes. And we see now how governments hate spending money on the military. Speaker 4 (17:22) They do. But equally, governments sometimes think that there's a degree of face they cannot possibly lose. The humorous magazine Punch. They got a joke. Yeah, slightly unamusing rhyme. But dash the expense, however immense, we can nothing cheaper than fight. And I think what they mean by that is the cost to the British people of losing face will ultimately be greater than that of the balance sheet, that actually in the long run, it's better to pay the money now. Anyway, let's move forward to the autumn of 1867. So by the final week in October. The advance party, which is made up of Bombay Marines and Bombay-like cavalry and engineers and sappers, have landed in a place they call Annesley Bay. And if you look it up, it is now the Gulf of Zula in Eritrea. They've found an anchorage for 100 ships, and then they send back measurement specifications for three large piers, which they will build to help them unload the ships. And so in the next few weeks, more men, more supplies follow. I mean, it's mind-boggling, the Enterprise. Hundreds of tons of coal. There are tramway sets. There's pile-driving machinery. And so by the new year of 1868, they have landed 13,000 soldiers, 20 miles of railway track, and 44 elephants, which were shipped across the Indian Ocean in specially reinforced transports. That is seven more elephants than Hannibal took. Really? Seven more? To Italy, yeah. Harar for Speaker 3 (18:57) Napier. Speaker 4 (18:57) And while they're doing that, their sappers are literally blasting away through the cliffs to find the best route to get to the highland plateau. So they're going to have to head up 8,000 feet