Lord Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, 1801–1885) was a British peer, philanthropist and humanitarian who is mentioned by P. H. van der Kemp (1900) as having presided over a public meeting held at the Mansion House in London during the 1884 negotiations over the London Convention on Transvaal. The reference appears in Appendix 12, which reproduces a letter of 28 May 1899 by D. P. Faure on the Transvaal suzerainty question.
The Mansion House meeting
While the conferences between the Imperial Government and the Transvaal deputation under President Kruger were still going on, a public meeting was held at the Mansion House at which Lord Shaftesbury took the chair. Faure records that “all the speakers declared themselves against further concessions to the Transvaal.” The meeting gave public expression to the political pressure that, in Faure’s account, prevented Lord Derby from consenting to an article in the new convention that would explicitly abrogate His Majesty’s suzerain rights. Lord Derby had argued in conference that he had no desire to put weapons into the hands of the parliamentary opposition to attack the ministry — an argument whose weight the deputation recognised, “for they knew that there was a strong party in the Lower House which had strongly condemned the retrocession of the South African Republic and was now determined to permit no further concession.”
The Mansion House demonstration was, in other words, the public face of the opposition that the Government feared, and Shaftesbury’s chairmanship gave it the authority of his name.
Comparative significance in Van der Kemp
Van der Kemp’s interest in the Transvaal parallel is thematic. He had earlier argued that the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824) was concluded by Dutch plenipotentiaries under similar pressure from the British opposition: Castlereagh had warned the Dutch envoy Fagel that “we should have to make some sacrifices for the sake of the opposition in England,” a phrase that gave rise to a sharp correspondence between Fagel and minister Van Nagell in January 1820. Lord Shaftesbury’s Mansion House meeting in 1884 is the South-African counterpart of that earlier opposition; in both cases, Van der Kemp suggests, the negotiators used the supposed weight of domestic public opinion to extract concessions from the other side and to refuse explicit commitments on points they had conceded in private.
The Van der Kemp article does not describe Lord Shaftesbury’s well-known humanitarian career — his factory reform, lunacy reform, ragged schools, or his support for the Zionist movement — since these are not relevant to the Transvaal question. He appears solely as the chairman of an opposition meeting that influenced the outcome of the London Convention on Transvaal (1884).
See Also
- Paul Kruger
- Lord Derby
- D. P. Faure
- Joseph Chamberlain
- Suzerainty question
- London Convention on Transvaal (1884)
- Faure’s letter on Transvaal suzerainty
- Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824)
Source
Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819, by P. H. van der Kemp, in Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië, 6e Volgr., Deel VII (1900), pp. 159–239. Universiteitsbibliotheek Vrije Universiteit, LS.08781.
Lord Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, 1801–1885) was a British peer, philanthropist and humanitarian who is mentioned by P. H. van der Kemp (1900) as having presided over a public meeting held at the Mansion House in London during the 1884 negotiations over the London Convention on Transvaal. The reference appears in Appendix 12, which reproduces a letter of 28 May 1899 by D. P. Faure on the Transvaal suzerainty question.
The Mansion House meeting
While the conferences between the Imperial Government and the Transvaal deputation under President Kruger were still going on, a public meeting was held at the Mansion House at which Lord Shaftesbury took the chair. Faure records that “all the speakers declared themselves against further concessions to the Transvaal.” The meeting gave public expression to the political pressure that, in Faure’s account, prevented Lord Derby from consenting to an article in the new convention that would explicitly abrogate His Majesty’s suzerain rights. Lord Derby had argued in conference that he had no desire to put weapons into the hands of the parliamentary opposition to attack the ministry — an argument whose weight the deputation recognised, “for they knew that there was a strong party in the Lower House which had strongly condemned the retrocession of the South African Republic and was now determined to permit no further concession.”
The Mansion House demonstration was, in other words, the public face of the opposition that the Government feared, and Shaftesbury’s chairmanship gave it the authority of his name.
Comparative significance in Van der Kemp
Van der Kemp’s interest in the Transvaal parallel is thematic. He had earlier argued that the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824) was concluded by Dutch plenipotentiaries under similar pressure from the British opposition: Castlereagh had warned the Dutch envoy Fagel that “we should have to make some sacrifices for the sake of the opposition in England,” a phrase that gave rise to a sharp correspondence between Fagel and minister Van Nagell in January 1820. Lord Shaftesbury’s Mansion House meeting in 1884 is the South-African counterpart of that earlier opposition; in both cases, Van der Kemp suggests, the negotiators used the supposed weight of domestic public opinion to extract concessions from the other side and to refuse explicit commitments on points they had conceded in private.
The Van der Kemp article does not describe Lord Shaftesbury’s well-known humanitarian career — his factory reform, lunacy reform, ragged schools, or his support for the Zionist movement — since these are not relevant to the Transvaal question. He appears solely as the chairman of an opposition meeting that influenced the outcome of the London Convention on Transvaal (1884).
See Also
- Paul Kruger
- Lord Derby
- D. P. Faure
- Joseph Chamberlain
- Suzerainty question
- London Convention on Transvaal (1884)
- Faure’s letter on Transvaal suzerainty
- Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824)
Source
Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819, by P. H. van der Kemp, in Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië, 6e Volgr., Deel VII (1900), pp. 159–239. Universiteitsbibliotheek Vrije Universiteit, LS.08781.