Rudd Concession - Validity Dispute - Rhodes Wins The Royal Charter

Rhodes Wins The Royal Charter

Albert Grey, the Earl of Fife and the Duke of Abercorn (left to right), the three public board members recruited by Rhodes and Cawston for their prospective chartered company during early 1889, all depicted by Leslie Ward in Vanity Fair

In late March 1889, just as the izinDuna were about to leave London, Rhodes arrived to make the amalgamation with Cawston and Gifford official. To the amalgamators' dismay, the Colonial Office had received protests against the Rudd Concession from a number of London businessmen and humanitarian societies, and had resolved that it could not sanction the concession because of its equivocal nature, as well as the fact that Lobengula no longer avowed it. Rhodes was originally angry with Maund, accusing him of responsibility for this, but eventually accepted that it was not Maund's fault. Rhodes told Maund to go back to Bulawayo, to pose as an impartial adviser, and to try to sway the king back in favour of the concession; as an added contingency, he told Maund to secure as many new subconcessions as he could.

In London, as the amalgamation was formalised, Rhodes and Cawston sought public members to sit on the board of their prospective chartered company. They recruited the Duke of Abercorn, an affluent Irish peer and landowner with estates in Donegal and Scotland, to chair the firm, and the Earl of Fife—soon to become the Duke of Fife, following his marriage to the daughter of the Prince of Wales—to act as his deputy. The third and final public member added to the board was the nephew and heir apparent of the erstwhile Cabinet minister Earl Grey, Albert Grey, who was a staunch imperialist, already associated with southern Africa. Attempting to ingratiate himself with Lord Salisbury, Rhodes then gave the position of standing counsel in the proposed company to the Prime Minister's son, Lord Robert Cecil. Horace Farquhar, a prominent London financier and friend of the Prince of Wales, was added to the board at Fife's suggestion later in the year.

Rhodes spent the next few months in London, seeking out supporters for his cause in the West End, the City and, occasionally, the rural estates of the landed gentry. These efforts yielded the public backing of the prominent imperialist Harry Johnston, Alexander Livingstone Bruce (who sat on the board of the East Africa Company), and Lord Balfour of Burleigh, among others. Along with Grey's active involvement and Lord Salisbury's continuing favour, the weight of this opinion seemed to be reaping dividends for Rhodes by June 1889. The amalgamation with the London syndicate was complete, and Whitehall seemed to have dropped its reservations regarding the Rudd Concession's validity. Opposition to the charter in parliament and elsewhere had been for the most part silenced, and, with the help of Rhodes' press contacts, prominently William Thomas Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, opinion in the media was starting to back the idea of a chartered company for south-central Africa. But in June 1889, just as it seemed the Colonial Office was about to grant the royal charter, Lobengula's letter repudiating the Rudd Concession, written two months previously, arrived in London.

Maguire, in London, promptly wrote to the Colonial Office, casting doubt on the letter's character on the grounds that it lacked the witnessing signature of an unbiased missionary. He concurrently wrote to Thompson, who was still in Bulawayo, to ask if there was any sign that the king had been misled during the repudiation letter's drafting. Around the same time, Robinson's strident attacks on parliamentary opponents of the Rudd Concession led to Lord Salisbury replacing him with Sir Henry Brougham Loch. Rhodes claimed not to be worried, telling Shippard in a letter that "the policy will not be altered". Indeed, by the end of June 1889, despite the removal of Robinson and the sensation caused by Lobengula's letter rejecting the concession, Rhodes had got his way: Lord Salisbury's concerns of Portuguese and German expansionism in Africa, coupled with Rhodes' personal exertions in London, prompted the Prime Minister to approve the granting of a royal charter. Rhodes returned victorious to the Cape in August 1889, while back in London Cawston oversaw the final preparations for the chartered company's establishment.

"My part is done," Rhodes wrote to Maund, soon after reaching Cape Town; "the charter is granted supporting Rudd Concession and granting us the interior ... We have the whole thing recognised by the Queen and even if eventually we had any difficulty with king the Home people would now always recognise us in possession of the minerals they quite understand that savage potentates frequently repudiate." A few weeks later, he wrote to Maund again: with the royal charter in place, "whatever does now will not affect the fact that when there is a white occupation of the country our concession will come into force provided the English and not Boers get the country". On 29 October 1889, nearly a year to the day after the signing of the Rudd Concession, Rhodes' chartered company, the British South Africa Company, was officially granted its royal charter by Queen Victoria. The concession's legitimacy was now safeguarded by the charter and, by extension, the British Crown, making it practically unassailable.

Read more about this topic:  Rudd Concession, Validity Dispute

Famous quotes containing the words rhodes, wins, royal and/or charter:

    We’re definite in Nova Scotia—’bout things like ships ... and fish, the best in the world.
    —John Rhodes Sturdy, Canadian screenwriter. Richard Rossen. Joyce Cartwright (Ella Raines)

    But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.... Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject.
    Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)

    Here was a royal fellowship of death.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    When Britain first, at Heaven’s command,
    Arose from out the azure main,
    This was the charter of her land,
    And guardian angels sung the strain:
    Rule, Britannia! Britannia rules the waves!
    Britons never shall be slaves.
    James Thomson (1700–1748)