The secret Rhodes
Text: Robin Brown. Article from the November 2015 issue of Noseweek Magazine.
‘I leave all my worldly goods in trust for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object thereof shall be the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of immigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire…’
This surely numbers among the most deranged sets of objectives ever compiled, declares Robin Brown of this first will drafted by Cecil John Rhodes in his just-published biography of the ‘Colossus’: The Secret Society – Cecil John Rhodes’s Plan for a New World Order.
But, despite the grandiosity of the secret plan, Rhodes and his successors managed to achieve many of its objectives.
Noseweek reproduces the following extract by arrangement with the publisher, Penguin Random House.
Cecil John Rhodes’s Biographers have generally been bewildered by his time at Oxford, straining to resurrect the boy obsessed with Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the youth captivated by obscure classics, the admirer of Marcus Aurelius who thrived on intellectual debate. What adds to the confusion is the fact that, at this point of his life, there was not the slightest hint that, buried deep in-side Cecil John Rhodes, was a playboydandy straining to get out.
The 20-year-old Rhodes arrived at Oxford, wearing what would become his trademark “bags” trousers], with a chamois pouch of uncut diamonds in his pocket, and that he sat a Latin entrance examination for University College – which he failed. [He spent just one term at Oxford in 1873, then quit to return to Kimberley, and only resumed his Oxford career in 1876.]
Oxford was not the end for this fashionably attired Rhodes. It was the starting point in a saga of epic proportions, which Rhodes set in motion: the hoard of diamonds, the piles of gold, the mysticism and secret societies, King Solomon’s mines and biblical Ophir, and political and sexual intrigues involving princes, presidents and prime ministers. There were huge successes and spectacular failures. And above all, there was the growing influence of his Secret Society and its eventual role — under Milner – in rescuing England from defeat in the Great War.
A significant factor in these developments is Rhodes’s homosexuality. Within the space of a few years he would be mingling with a powerful coterie of allegedly gay, lesbian and bisexual men and women, all of whom would become members of, or be politically associated with, his Secret Society. Prominent in this group were two prime ministers, Lord Balfour and Lord Rosebery, a royal mistress, Daisy Greville, a prime minister’s wife, Margot Asquith, and Reginald Baliol Brett, who had the ear of three generations of royalty, from Queen Victoria to King George. Brett himself was a self-confessed pederast.
After Rhodes moved out of the brick-and-tin “mess” he had occupied with his “brothers” in Kimberley, he shared lodgings with his siblings Herbert and Frank, and his friend Scully. But now Rhodes, already a successful young businessman – who occasionally met his academic obligations in Oxford — went a significant step further: he set up house with his secretary, Neville Pickering. The two men lived together, apparently very happily for years, until Pickering’s fatal horse accident sometime later.
The debates and arguments that Rhodes enjoyed with his band of brothers filled many long hours in the intellectual desert of the diggings. The mundane business of grubbing for diamonds was set aside for weightier talk, particularly with Sidney Shippard and Caesar Hawkins, about how to put the world to rights and “the Game” as Rhodes always referred to it.
For the Victorians, the phrase came to have a particular meaning, and it was later immortalised in the novels of Rudyard Kipling and John Buchan, both of whom were close friends of Rhodes. Essentially, the Game – or “the Great Game” – was English imperialism, facilitated by upper-class “secret agents” who were generally members of secret societies and who usually had three things in common: a public-school education, a token university degree, and private wealth. These agents operated on the frontiers of the Empire, were experts at passing themselves off as natives, and all belonged to prestigious London clubs.
In Kimberley the festering political disputes were, if anything, even worse than the digging conditions. The two neighbouring Boer republics still laid claim to the diamond fields, though the British intervention had forced them to sit back and watch as 50,000 foreigners, whom the puritanical Boers perceived as drunks and whore-mongers, settled in as their neighbours.
These Uitlanders – mostly foreigners like Rhodes – held the Boers hi contempt; their scorn embraced the illiterate old president, Oom (Uncle) Paul Kruger, as well as what they perceived as a scattering of peasant farmers occupying vast stretches of unfenced veld. For men like Rhodes, this was all simply to be brushed aside, and the land incorporated into a proper English-speaking colony as soon as troops could be diverted from the Kaffir Wars to do the job.
The Boers had no idea that a stripling Uitlander, Cecil John Rhodes, had already begun to dream of an Africa in which they would play no part whatsoever — unless, of course, they agreed to play a passive role. In Rhodes’s scheme of things, if the republics remained in Boer hands they would he nothing but roadblocks on the British highway he was planning from the Cape to Cairo.
However, Rhodes did occasionally let his guard drop in the presence of strangers. Captain Charles Warren observes upon meeting up with Rhodes en route to the diamond fields: “It was impossible not to recognise that he [Rhodes] had every prospect of a brilliant career.” Had the captain been a closer observer, he might have reported that the pretentious young man was a religious bigot spouting jingoistic nonsense (typical of many British who were abroad at the time). Instead, we have the following: “He relieved the tedium of the post-cart journey by intent study of the Book of Common Prayer… and mastering the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church.” Rhodes had also tucked away in his bags the draft of his Confession of Faith. Without realising it, Captain Warren was also presented with a broad outline of the aims and principles of the planned Secret Society, as Rhodes pronounced on man’s place in the universe, and predestination.
It should be pointed out that the Confession of Faith provides significant evidence of Rhodes’s latent homosexuality. Psychologists claim that, given Rhodes’s deep devotion to his mother, his Oedipal desire to be part of a band of brothers indicates repressed sexual impulses. He never outgrew his boyhood either, as Rotberg points out:
“That Rhodes remained a pre-adolescent in so many significant respects and these pre-adolescent characteristics shaped his striving for greatness, is clear. During Cecil’s school years the band of brothers substituted in important ways for the absent masculine influence of his father… Lacking it, Rhodes repeatedly sought the support of a gang or band. Subsequently in his personal relationships he always gravitated to friends or lovers with whom he could stay young.”
Anthony Sampson’s recent insights remain cogent: “the character of Rhodes – with his combination of shrewdness and adolescence, romanticism and ruthlessness, imagination and vulgarity, has eluded all his biographers”.
The actual birth of the Secret Society – in Rhodes’s so-called lost years of 1873 to 1876 – occurred in very humble surroundings in Kimberley, which were fortunately recorded by Lewis Michell, who attended with at least four other young men. Rhodes confessed to huge imperial ambitions, adding that the accumulation of wealth was no longer his prime objective:
“Gentlemen I have asked you to dine because I want to tell you what I want to do with the remainder of my life. I think that if a man when he is young determines to devote his life to one worthy object and persists in that, he can do a great deal during that life even if it is to be a short one as I know my life will be. The object to which I intend to devote my life is the defence and the extension of the British Empire. The British Empire stands for the protection of all the inhabitants of a country in life, liberty, fair play and happiness and is the greatest platform the world has ever seen for these purposes… It is mainly the extension of the Empire northwards that we have to watch and work for in South Africa.”
His audience, which included bankers and a civil servant, applauded. One of the group. Joseph Orpen, would go into politics, and he agreed that the British government was “fundamentally the best”. They decided to form a secret society and to exchange ideas on Rhodes’s “principals and points”. Joseph Orpen suggested members should be required to include a secret sign in all written correspondence – “the symbol of a five on the dice” — which would identify “The Pyramid of Brothers”. No further records of meetings exist.
The members maintained close ties. Michell remained Rhodes’s banker and became his first biographer. Some years later, together with Rhodes, Joseph Orpen entered the Cape Parliament. In time, and with Orpen at his side, Rhodes would become prime minister.
Alfred Milner, the man who would inherit these dreams as well as the task of implementing them, was more of an aesthete than a frontiersman. Milner’s first posting was as undersecretary for finance in Egypt in 1887-92, where he was introduced to Horatio Herbert Kitchener, at the time an intelligence officer in Egypt. For five years, Milner and Kitchener worked together on the same imperial team that, two years previously, included General Gordon in Khartoum.
Gordon and Kitchener were good friends, pail of a group that by now included Reginald Baliol Brett [Lord Esher], who, during the Great War. would run a clandestine intelligence service for Kitchener. To this list we can now add Milner. Many of these men were homosexual, and there is no denying that they strongly influenced British politics from late Victorian times through the Edwardian period. Brett kept a journal in which he recorded his affairs with men and boys, while Rhodes, as we have seen, had his band of brothers, his angels and lambs, as well as Neville Pickering, with whom he lived. Gordon had his brandy and his boys, while Kitchener had “a constant and inseparable companion” in his aide-de-camp, Captain Oswald FitzGerald. with whom he perished in 1916 in a torpedoed ship. Kitchener, like Gordon and Rhodes, avoided contact with women, took a great deal of interest in the Boy Scout movement, and decorated his rose garden with four pairs of bronze sculptures of boys. There have been similar speculations about Milner, whose sexual interests were, however, fairly conventional.
More than merely close friends and allies, they also shared an intimacy and trust. What is certain is that, these four giants — Rhodes, Gordon, Kitchener and Milner – shared a similar imperial dream.
Rhodes was now convinced by, if not obsessed with, the idea that Mashonaland held the biblical temple built by the Queen of Sheba for Solomon. A number of Rhodes’s followers shared these weird and wonderful beliefs, including Arthur Conan Doyle and WT Stead, the newspaperman who was also a famous medium. There was, at the time, broad interest in the occult, and one of Rhodes’s close associates, Arthur Balfour, was the son of the family that founded the Society for Psychical Research. Another such associate was Rudyard Kipling, who spent many winters with Rhodes at Groote Schuur.
The interior of Groote Schuur is dark and gloomy, even in the daytime, and heavy Victorian drapes are kept drawn as protection from sunlight and beat. It was in Rhodes’s bedroom that Alta Kriel had shown me the stone bird which Willie Posselt had stolen for him from the fabled “lost” city in Mashnnaland. Rhodes had, she informed me, been fixated on the Ra bird as well as other artefacts from Mashonaland. many of them made of gold. “Rhodes told his visitors that there were ghosts in Groote Schuur, and he virtually worshipped the stone bird we have here. It was always kept in (lis bedroom, on top of a wardrobe, and it was said he never took a major decision without it being present.” When Sir Herbert Baker rebuilt Groote Schuur after the fine, Rhodes had all the newel posts on the main staircase carved in the image of the stone bird.
For a brief period at Oxford, Rhodes was a Freemason, and his Groote Schuur library shelves held many books on topics such as the Rosierucians and Annie Besant’s Theosophical Society.
One such book dealt with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a closed society similar to Rhodes’s own Secret Society.
Rhodes knew from Willie Posselt that the “lost city” was just a week’s march north of Lobengula’s kraal in Bulawayo. There was even a “Saba” (Sheba) river winding its way through “Ophir”. Rhodes had secretly arranged for this river, as well as the Mazoe, a tributary of the Zambezi, to be “panned”, and both had produced workable quantities of alluvial gold.
Rhodes’s belief that he had stumbled upon ancient Ophir became his best-kept secret. It is no exaggeration to say that without what Rudd called the “Ophir promise” and the stone bird Willie Posselt had stolen from the site, Rhodes might never have bothered to raise the money he needed to invade Mashonaland and eventually establish Rhodesia.
That same year [1891], Nathan Rothschild arrived at Rhodes’s hotel, the Westminster Palace, for the first of several confidential meetings with Rhodes. They undoubtedly discussed the Secret Society, for in the very next will that Rhodes drew up he added a codicil entrusting the Society and its future protection to Rothschild, At Rhodes’s side was his latest friend, Charlie (later Sir Charles) Metcalfe, a mysterious intimate who kept the details of their relationship secret. For close on ten years Metcalfe accompanied Rhodes almost everywhere he went.
There was one other important meeting during this glorious visit of 1891: Rhodes went to see Brett, friend and confidant of Queen Victoria, and later influential “whisperer” to King Edward VII and King George V. It is not known how the two men got to know each other, though Brett appears to have been called in after Stead’s first meeting with Rhodes. What is certain, however, is that Brett and Rhodes had a lot more than imperial politics in common – indeed, Robert Rotberg puts this bluntly:
“Brett was a well-connected, ingratiating, homosexual and pederast.”
Brett habitually had affairs with Eton boys who had been groomed by his old tutor, the details of which are graphically described in his Journals. [He] was part of a ring of influential politicians with similar predilections. Best known among these was Lewis (“Loulou”) Vernon Harcourt – son of the home secretary Sir William Harcourt – who committed suicide when his escapades with an Eton student went public.
The documented accounts of Brett’s sexual inclinations are significant because they represent rare hard evidence of the shared interests of three highly influential men at the height of Empire: Cecil Rhodes, “Chinese” Gordon, and Brett himself. In the pages that follow, the list will grow, supporting recent suggestions that a homosexual hegemony – which was already operative in the Secret Society – went on to influence, if not control, British politics at the beginning of the twentieth century.
By now Rhodes is 38 years old. He has been lurking in the relative darkness of the closet for 20 years – when suddenly he discovers that he is not alone in this. Rhodes discovered in England that homosexuals survived only if they formed a society that remained secret, ring-fenced by wealth and political influence. When this class of moralistic Victorians encountered practices they deemed repugnant, they simply looked the other away.
[He also] discovered that this band of brothers was not only large but composed of extremely powerful people. They met at private dinner parties like Verschoyle’s but they also attended the grand entertainments of society hostesses.It was at such functions that Rhodes learnt the rules of Victorian homosexuality: charm the women, perhaps an easy undertaking if one were an aesthete or avant garde, though Rhodes was neither. Alternatively, share the beds of bisexual women, though the most effective ploy by far was to don the impermeable suit of social armour: marriage. The coup de grace was to have a few offspring of one’s own, within wedlock of course.
Both WT Stead and Bramwell Booth of the Salvation Army tried to persuade Rhodes to wear this armour, and had he lived longer he may well have been tempted. He certainly tested the waters in his friendship with Olive Schreiner – a failed effort, however.
There was at the time a “gang” suspected of strongly influencing British politics in the first part of the twentieth century: Brett, a homosexual and active pederast; the promiscuous and predatory Loulou Harcourt, who for a while was secretary to his father William, the home secretary, and who himself later became colonial secretary; Archie Primrose, Lord Rosebery, prime minister, who was accused by the Marquess of Queensberry of sodomising his eldest son; and Cecil Rhodes who, after Neville Pickering’s death, was no longer averse to parading his lambs and angels on social outings.
There were many more, like Arthur Balfour, the self-obsessed, aloof and effete future prime minister who never married. It would not be long before the issue of gay and lesbian control of British society and government was eventually raised in Parliament.
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