Victoria's Generals Read online

  23 June 1852

  Commissioned into Royal Engineers

  17 February 1854

  Promoted Lieutenant

  1 January 1855

  Arrived in Crimea

  6 June 1855

  Wounded before Sebastopol

  18 May 1856

  Posted to the Turco-Russian Boundary Commission

  22 February 1858

  Elected Fellow of Royal Geographical Society

  1 April 1859

  Promoted Captain

  1860–62

  Service in China

  30 December 1862

  Promoted Brevet Major

  24 March 1863

  Appointed Commander, ‘Ever Victorious Army’

  16 February 1864

  Promoted Brevet Lieutenant Colonel

  28 June 1864

  Relinquished command of ‘Ever Victorious Army’ and awarded the Chinese rank of ti-tu (Provincial C in C or Field Marshal)

  1 September 1865

  Appointed CRE, Gravesend

  15 November 1871

  Appointed to Danubian Commission and as Vice Consul at Galatz

  16 February 1872

  Promoted Brevet Colonel

  5 July 1872

  Promoted Major

  18 October 1873

  Accepted offer to become Governor of Egypt’s Equatoria provinces in southern Sudan

  December 1876

  Resigned as Governor of Equatoria

  24 December 1876

  Accepted appointment as Governor General of the Sudan

  5 May 1877

  Formally invested as Governor General in Khartoum

  29 July 1879

  Resigned as Governor General

  2 March 1880

  Declined command of Natal Colonial Forces

  28 April 1880

  Appointed Private Secretary to the Viceroy

  2 June 1880

  Resigned as Private Secretary

  21 March 1881

  Appointed CRE, Mauritius

  24 March 1882

  Promoted Major General

  2 April 1882

  Again offered command of Natal Colonial Forces

  27 September 1882

  Resigned as Commandant General of Natal Colonial Forces

  15 October 1883

  Offered appointment as Governor of (Belgian) Congo

  18 January 1884

  Accepted offer to become Governor General of the Sudan

  21 January 1884

  Formally appointed Governor General

  18 February 1884

  Arrived at Khartoum

  26 January 1885

  Killed at Khartoum

  Appointed CB, 1864

  Having volunteered for service in China, Gordon left England in July 1860, joining Lord Elgin’s expeditionary force at Tientsin in September as a Brevet Major and second in command of an engineering unit.2 Following the surrender of Peking (Beijing) on 13 October, Elgin ordered the destruction of the Emperor’s Summer Palace as a reprisal for the torture and killing of British emissaries by three of the Emperor’s generals and to encourage the Emperor to sign a peace treaty. Gordon later said that he regretted his participation in the place’s destruction. Serving under the command of Staveley, now a Lieutenant General and C in C of the Madras army, Gordon stayed on for eighteen months, visiting the Great Wall, and then returning to Shanghai where he came under the influence of American Methodists and a Jewish Lithuanian merchant who introduced him to Jewish Hasidic fundamentalism.

  On Staveley’s recommendation, Gordon was appointed to command a multinational military force, the 2,100-man so-called ‘Ever Victorious Army’, at Sunkiang on 24 March 1863. This mercenary force had been created in June 1860 by Shanghai-based British, French, American and Chinese merchants to defend imperial and foreign interests against Taiping rebels.3 The force was originally led by an American adventurer, Frederick Townsend Ward, who trained the force in western tactics and achieved several victories against the Taipings, but was killed in September 1862. Gordon became its fourth commander, replacing a British Marine Captain named Holland who had been defeated trying to capture Taitsan. The British Consul General characterised Gordon as the only British officer who had no enemies in the international community. He had few friends but he was much respected. He spoke French, which pleased the French, and French officers with whom he had served in the Crimean War thought well of him. Again he was respected in the American community and the influential Methodists spoke well of him. Of course, he had Staveley’s support and Gordon’s own father enjoyed the esteem of the War Office in London, which duly approved the appointment. It seemed there could be no better choice.4 Gordon was made a Mandarin and General in the Chinese army subject to the authority of Li Hung-chang, Kiangsu Futai (provincial governor) and commander of the province’s military forces.

  In March 1863, another former commander of the ‘Ever Victorious Army’, an American called Henry Andrea Burgevine, who had succeeded Ward but had then been dismissed for striking a Chinese official, appealed to the American Minister, Anson Burlingame, to have him restored to his command. In turn, Burlingame appealed to the British minister, Frederick Bruce, who had already registered his objections to having a serving British officer in command of a Chinese force. Bruce referred the matter to the Chinese regent, who left the matter to Li. The latter rejected the appeal, recording in his diary: ‘It is a direct blessing from Heaven, I believe, the coming of this British Gordon…. He is superior in manner and bearing to any of the foreigners I have come into contact with and does not show outwardly that conceit which makes most of them repugnant in my sight.’5 Bruce ordered General W G Brown, who had replaced Staveley, to intervene, but he refused to do so and, to make his intentions perfectly clear, Li promoted Gordon to tsung-ping (Major General – the second highest rank in the Chinese army).

  In April 1863 Gordon, carrying a short rattan cane – later referred to as ‘the wand of victory’ – captured Taitsan, avenging Holland’s defeat, and suppressed a mutiny among his own men, who had not been paid and resented Gordon’s prohibition of looting in the town: he received a commitment from the Chinese to establish a regular payment system for his soldiers. In May Gordon captured Quinsan and Chunyi, the keys to a complex canal system, and refurbished a small naval force to cut off the enemy’s retreat to Soochow. Gordon’s great tactical strengths – thorough planning, full reconnaissance and indirect tactics – appeared for the first time in these battles.

  Without consulting Li, Gordon wrote to the rebel leadership in June 1863 offering to mediate peace. At the time, Bruce and the British director of Chinese customs were plotting to supplant provincial forces with a national Chinese military commanded by Europeans. The Chinese Imperial commander, General Ching, whose plan for an offensive against the rebels had been rejected by Li in favour of Gordon’s, also coveted Quinsan as his headquarters. Consequently, Gordon offered Li Hung-chang his resignation, but it was refused.

  On 1 August Burgevine, who had assembled a mercenary force at Shanghai, stole a gunboat and joined the rebels at Soochow. Gordon, who had vouched for Burgevine’s good character when rumours about his intentions had surfaced in July, decided to stay on. In October, at the culmination of a complex series of plots and counterplots, Burgevine and other westerners were turned over to Gordon by the rebels in return for weapons and ammunition. After more twists and turns, which (along with rumours, spread by General Ching that Gordon was negotiating separately with the rebels) alienated Li from Gordon, Burgevine left China for Japan.

  Gordon’s first (night) attack on Soochow on 27/28 November was the first defeat suffered by the ‘Ever Victorious Army’ since Gordon had assumed command. The next day, however, a key fortification was captured. After much negotiation and intrigue, the Taiping leader in Soochow surrendered the city to Ching on 5 December. Gordon held the ‘Ever Victorious Army’ outside the city to enable the surrender to be a purely Chinese affair and to keep
his force from participating in its looting. To offset the booty on which his troops counted, Gordon asked Li to award them with an extra month’s pay. When Li offered only half that amount, Gordon submitted his resignation for a second time. Then, on 6 December, despite Li’s promises of safe conduct, the Soochow rebel leaders were executed under mysterious circumstances on Li’s barge. Gordon was enraged by the betrayal. Accordingly, he offered sanctuary to the rebel leader’s son, withdrew to Quinsan, and resigned again.

  In one of several attempts to heal the breach, Li sent Gordon a military medal and reward of 10,000 taels from the Emperor. Li also sent him two rebel battle flags, which Gordon rejected. In February 1864, however, Li accepted responsibility for the deaths and Gordon accepted the possibility that ‘the Futai has some extenuating circumstances in favour of his action … I think we can scarcely expect the same discernment that we should from a European governor’.6 Gordon resumed command of the ‘Ever Victorious Army’. Bruce, who feared that Burgevine might return from Japan as a Confederate agent, now supported Gordon.7 In the same month, Gordon received promotion to Brevet Lieutenant Colonel in the British army.

  Attacking a heavily defended Kitang in March, Gordon was wounded in the leg and forced to withdraw after sustaining over 100 casualties. With Gordon thus sidelined by his wound, his army then failed to displace rebel forces outside the town of Waisso. Nonetheless, on 11 May 1864 the rebel fortress of Changzhou on the Grand Canal fell to the Imperial and ‘Ever Victorious Army’ forces. Gordon also helped plan the assault on the rebel capital of Nanking, though Chinese pride dictated that the ‘foreign devils’ not participate in the final victory on 19 July 1864. Hung Hsiu-ch’uan, the ‘Heavenly King’, committed suicide and some 100,000 rebels were killed or committed suicide in the attack and its aftermath.

  Under public pressure following the newspaper reports of the Soochow ‘massacre’ the British government had withdrawn its Order-in-Council that permitted serving British officers to serve in the Chinese army and Gordon ended his service there. He refused any cash reward but accepted the rank of ti-tu (provincial C in C – the equivalent of a Field Marshal), the right (the first accorded to a ‘foreign devil’) to wear a Yellow Cape (the highest award in the Ch’in empire for military service) and a peacock feather in his hat.

  Gordon left China in November 1864. Though he tried to slip away quietly, the banks of the canal were lined with Chinese soldiers setting off fireworks and artillery and playing martial music. In China he was known as ‘The Great General Ko’ and in Britain as ‘Chinese’ Gordon. About the publicity he was getting at home, he wrote to his sister, ‘I do not care a jot about my promotion or what people may say, I know I shall leave China as poor as I entered it.’8

  On returning to England, Gordon took up residence in Southampton with his parents and several of his brothers and sisters. He also welcomed his old friend turned recruiter for Garibaldi, Gessi. Gordon admired Garibaldi but Gessi failed to recruit Gordon to the cause of Italian Unification. Gordon’s father, who died in September 1865, had requested that his son be appointed CRE at Gravesend and Gordon took up the post just a few weeks before his father’s death. He was tasked with the erection of new fortifications on the Thames to protect London in the event of a possible French invasion.

  Finding his official duties minimal, Gordon became concerned about the poor and destitute waifs and elderly in Gravesend. He made contact with various religious groups, all of whom believed that the poor should be morally regenerated and spiritually reclaimed from drink and prostitution, but did little to alleviate their poverty. He finally worked with a Nonconformist couple named Freese to write tracts of his own on the subject and he held garden parties at his official residence, with the leftovers being distributed to the poor. He also brought coal to the poor, ordered his gardens divided into allotments where they could grow vegetables, volunteered to teach at the local ragged school and invited some of the boys into his official residence at Fort House to sleep, giving them new clothes and boots when they left. In the autumn of 1867, he opened a ragged school of his own. For almost five years he devoted over 30 hours weekly to these endeavours. Based on Revelations 1:6 he called the boys ‘Kings’ and used the terms ‘Lambs’ (as Christ’s followers were known) and the Chinese wang (princes of the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace) to their faces, but wrote privately of his efforts: ‘How far better to be allowed to be kind to a little Scrub than to govern the greatest kingdoms.’9

  Gordon volunteered for the Abyssinian expedition in 1868, but was refused on the grounds that its soldiers were all to be drawn from the Indian army. Then, in November 1871, in response to accumulated resentments at the War Office about Gordon’s international fame and among his peers about his rapid promotions and Nonconformist attitudes, he was appointed the Foreign Office representative on the multinational Danubian Commission and Vice Consul at the Black Sea port of Galatz (Galati). At a plenary session of the Danubian Commission in May 1872, Gordon presented his idea of a Danube–Black Sea canal, which would speed commerce by shortening the distance by 250 miles and create a waterway wholly controlled by a single country (Rumania). The British government had little interest in the idea and, in his disappointment, and depressed that two of the boys that he had sponsored in England had died, Gordon was intrigued by a thinly veiled offer by the Egyptian chief minister, Nubar Pasha, to replace Sir Samuel Baker as Governor of Egypt’s Equatoria Province with a salary of £10,000. Gordon responded that he would think about it if Nubar could suggest the canal project to the Ottoman Sultan, Abdul Aziz, to whom Egypt still owed nominal allegiance.

  Frustrated by continued indifference to his canal idea and by the general inaction of the Danubian Commission, as well as his failure to gain a transfer to Wolseley’s campaign against the Asante, Gordon accepted Nubar Pasha’s renewed offer on 18 October 1873 and suggested that Gessi accompany him. In September, he received permission from the British government and was appointed a general of the Turkish army. His task was to solidify Egyptian control of the southern Sudan’s ivory, foodstuffs, cotton and slave-trading wealth. Gordon formally accepted his appointment on condition that he could operate independently from his immediate superior, Ismail Ayub Pasha, the Governor General of the Sudan, though he would take care not to affront him. He accepted only £2,000 as his salary, showing the Egyptians ‘that gold and silver are not worshipped all over the world’.10

  Gordon believed that the Khedive’s motives were honest,11 but that Nubar and the Egyptian bureaucracy were not committed to the venture and had employed Gordon as a sop to public opinion in the country that now largely controlled Egypt’s economy. After a difficult journey, Gordon arrived at Khartoum on 13 March 1874.12 While there, he failed to detect the intimate relationships between government officials and the slave trade, but did issue decrees outlawing private armies, establishing ivory trading as a government monopoly, and banning the importation of gunpowder into Equatoria. This hampered the ability of slavers to maintain private armies and destroyed one of their chief covers, but also deprived the non-Muslim native tribes of a major source of income and drove many of them into uneasy alliance with the slavers.

  On 16 April 1874 Gordon arrived at Gondokoro, where he found that military discipline had dissipated as the Egyptian garrison had not been paid in months and was compensating by taking bribes and engaging in the trading of African girls. The wily ruler of Buganda, Mutesa, who had participated in Egypt’s slave trade since the 1840s, sent emissaries to Gondokoro to greet Gordon when he arrived there. Gordon responded by sending gifts and greetings. Gordon himself left Gessi in charge and returned to Khartoum, where he obtained chests full of Maria Theresa silver dollars (thalers) to pay his expenses in Equatoria. When he returned in May, he and his lieutenants decided to send the useless Egyptian garrison north to man a new fort – established by Gordon on his way back south – at a Shillook tribal village where the Sobat river joined the White Nile. At the northern boundary of Equatoria and
therefore closer to Egypt, he hoped this would rebuild their morale: instead they soon developed a thriving trade in Somali slaves.

  Frustrated by his lack of transport and by the need to deal with large numbers of freed blacks, Gordon concluded that the real evil was less slavery itself than the trade that brought the slaves north. He suggested, therefore, that instead of abolishing the slave trade, it should become a state monopoly under the control of a European director to rid it of its worst abuses. The proposal was rejected by the Khedive. In January 1875 a party of 500 ivory porters, led by Wad el-Mek, arrived at Gondokoro, adding to Gordon’s available manpower and enabling him to send out three scouting expeditions. One, headed by a Union army veteran, Charles Chaille Long, moved westward into Makraka country to recruit porters and troops, but, ill, Long returned to brief Gordon in March and was sent back to Cairo.13 A second expedition down the Nile to Lake Albert was led by a recently arrived Royal Engineer subaltern, Chippendall, who was prevented by a smallpox epidemic from reconnoitring all the way to the lake and rejoined Gordon at Kerri. He helped Gordon to construct the outpost there, and, having developed a huge growth on his neck, left for Cairo in late July. The third, to Mutesa of Buganda, was led by a French Arabist, Ernest Linant de Bellefond, who was surprised to find Henry Stanley there on a Christianising mission when he arrived at Mutesa’s capital. Linant and Stanley joined forces to proselytise Mutesa and Stanley left convinced that he had converted him, making Mutesa a darling of British evangelists. The psychopathic ruler was now confronted, however, by new threats/opportunities from competing interests. Mutesa therefore sought to enlist the British in his war against the Bunyoro, and failing to do so, conscripted and detained Linant’s men. They escaped and Linant reported back to Gordon in August.