Unofficial Royalty

Hello gentle readers, I hope you all had lovely Christmas celebrations no matter your beliefs, and that 2009 will bring better times. It is also a special year in the histories of many of your countries. On April 28, The Commonwealth will be sixty years old, having been officially declared in 1949. To recognize this milestone the Jester will be presenting a series of columns this year which traces the history of the major participants; their monarchies, how each came to be part of the British Empire, and then how things went for them thereafter as a member of the Commonwealth.

As Canada, Australia, the USA, and New Zealand were technically already under British colonial power, and their evolutions are well known, we’ll concentrate on those nations that already had a sovereign system in place-India and South Africa to start.

First though to clarify, the Head of the Commonwealth is the sovereign of England, the first being King George VI. However he never used the title during his lifetime. When the idea of ‘Commonwealth’ was presented he was concerned that it would be confused with member nations like Australia which called itself a Commonwealth already. He thought it would be better to place ‘British’ in front of it. However after discussing it with the Prime Ministers involved he agreed to accept the title. Queen Elizabeth II was the first to actually use the title, but it was not included in the Coronation Service; as a coronation is a primarily religious ceremony it was considered unfair to those member nations who were not Christian.

The story really begins 500 years ago when Tudor England was broke. Ever since Marco Polo’s book came out showing just how rich the Orient was, European kings had been trying without success to find a fast route over there. Land routes through Russia and Persia, established during the Crusades, had always been long, tedious and dangerous (Richard III). When the great land mass of North America got in the way of finding the mythical North West Passage, fledgling efforts in the 1600’s to settle colonies on its coast failed. Prospective settlers had proved to be more adept at piracy than plowing. They knew neither how to farm nor defend themselves against the “Indians’. The Wars of the Roses and England’s constant tilts with France had wiped out her exploration budget Meanwhile Spain had gone ahead and discovered ‘America’, namely Florida and the islands of the Caribbean, while Portugal’s Vasco da Gama rounded Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. John Cabot had claimed the barren island of Newfoundland, off what would become Canada, for King Henry VII in 1503. Eighty years later Sir Walter Raleigh’s half-brother Humphrey Gilbert tried and failed to start a colony there. Raleigh himself, in full empire mode, tried to persuade Elizabeth I that she had to act in South America to fend off growing Catholic expansion plans. Her reluctance proved true because he wasn’t very good at it. Clapped in the tower he eventually lost his head over his colonial failure in Guiana.

However Elizabeth did encourage Drake and others, under the guise of searching for trade routes and slaves, and not a little pirating themselves, to actively find and maintain trade routes to South America and the Caribbean. The Kings of Spain, France, Netherlands and Portugal, who all had ports in these areas, soon caught wind of this and built well-armed fortresses to protect their interests. But it wasn’t long until power over land switched to power over sea for financial supremacy.

INDIA

While England’s Puritans once again began colonizing North America’s east coast, trade in the opposite hemisphere began in earnest.  Back in 1498, Portugal’s Vasco de Gama had founded the port of Calicut, and the Portuguese were still there defending it.  Thanks to visionary leadership by Henry the Navigator and Emmanuel the Fortunate, Portugal had full control over the Indian Ocean, with headquarters on the island of Goa. They captured Malacca in 1511, giving them control of the spice trade. Although they never could completely close the Red Sea they could enter and leave it unopposed. However by 1585 its vastly larger neighbour Spain had annexed Portugal and become the Number One sea power.

The vast Mogul-ruled area of north India was under the control of the brilliant Akbar. His grandfather Babur had established the Empire in 1526. On December 31, 1600 the East Indian Company received its charter. Following de Gama’s route they sent their well armed ships to Calicut. They founded their first post at Serat on the northwest coast in 1616, and then a second at Fort St. George (Madras) 25 years later. In 1690 they established Fort William, which became Calcutta. The excellent harbour of Bombay fell in their lap, give by Spain to King Charles II as part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry deal for their marriage.

Meanwhile the Mogul empire was falling apart. Emperor Aurangzeb, who had been keeping things more or less together, died in 1707. After that the Hindus and Moguls began fighting over territories. In 1737 Delhi was sacked. France and England saw the door opened, but it took 150 years of fighting, making and breaking alliances and treaties, and specifically out-fighting the French for Queen Victoria’s government to finally establish control over 150 Indian states and 11 British provinces.

SOUTH AFRICA

Protecting their Indian possessions then became a priority. The Portuguese had established Cape Colony at the southern tip of Africa, to refit and restock their ships heading for Calicut. Taking over from them the Dutch had established a small colony there by 1652. Compared to perhaps 60,000 people in North America there was perhaps 200 colonists at Cape by 1660. By 1806, England took over Cape Colony from them to guard Table Bay from the French.  It proved an expensive port to maintain and defend- the local inhabitants were not happy and proving restless.

The Dutch East India Company sponsored the Cape of Good Hope colony after 1652. The colonized Boer farmers lived in constant fear of the Bantu, a fearsome warrior people, nomadic and not exactly the poor oppressed and misunderstood victims the missionary societies swore them to be. As they were always ranting to their supporters back home, the tyrannical Boers were the aggressors, not the natives the Boers had enslaved. Mainly of Dutch ancestry, the Boer settlers were also Flemish, German and French- and Calvinists.

Not ones to settle in one place for long the kaffirs (defined as ‘Black Africans’) who had been pressed into slavery for 200 years were now proving uncooperative. The two main tribes, Matebele and Zulu, were in constant warfare with each other. For the twenty years beginning 1800 it is estimated that over one million tribal lives were lost.

While the French back home were revolting against King Louis XVI and his Queen Marie Antoinette in 1795 the British moved in and took over Cape Colony. The Boers did not take too well to their customs. In 1834 Britain emancipated all slaves in their territories. Now free, 12,000 ex- slaves wreaked horrendous revenge on their former masters.  Defeated and unhappy with what they considered grossly inadequate compensation from Britain on the loss of their slaves, what was left of the Boer settlers began the Great Trek north in 1836. Gigantic covered wagons pulled by teams of bullocks headed up and found a vast arable area they named the Orange Free State, where they finally defeated the local Matabele tribe. They set up independent republican towns in this Transvaal. However back in1824, a few British traders had settled at Durban in the Natal area, and their new neightbours didn’t appreciate their non-Boer presence either. In 1838 the Boers conquered the Zulu at Blood River and holed up there in relative peace until 1843. In 1852 the British gave them autonomous rights to the Transvaal, and then to the Orange Free State in 1854.  

In 1877, the British unilaterally annexed the Transvaal ostensibly to protect the reluctant Boers from the ongoing Zulu threats. But in a surprise attack at Majuba Hill the First Boer War in 1881 ended in British defeat. Under the Convention of Pretoria the Boers regained autonomy. But the peace didn’t last. Cecil Rhodes, backed by then Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain- Imperialist extraordinaire- had other plans for his Queen’s empire, namely a Cape-to-Cairo expansionist route under full British control. Naturally relations with republican President of the Transvaal, Paulus Kruger, steadily deteriorated.

Kruger had been born at Cape Colony and was 13 when he and his family took part in the Great Trek. By 1872 he was on the Transvaal executive and President of the Transvaal ten years later. He traveled to England, Holland and Germany to explain the Boer position. When gold was discovered in his backyard, making his farmers very wealthy, Kruger decided he needed German guns and German support to keep out ‘undesirables’. When he was advised that the British army from Cape Colony and Natal were about to attack he ordered some pre-emptive actions of his own.

We’ll go into more detail in future, along with explorations of how Egypt’s and other world monarchs played their roles in turning the gigantic British Empire into a working Commonwealth of Nations.

Gung Hay Fat Choy, but spend wisely!

- The Court Jester
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