Aubrey Herbert: the man who would not be king
Aubrey Herbert (1880-1923), second son of the 4th Earl of Carnarvon, was a man of extraordinary talents. According to the editor of Albania’s Greatest Friend, Herbert “has been allowed to disappear almost without trace from the mainstream chronicle of early 20th-century British political history.”
The 100th anniversary of Herbert’s untimely death in September 1923 is the right moment to recognise his heroic achievements and tell the story of this nearly blind soldier, diplomat, traveller, linguist and author. He took part in the Battle of Mons, where he was wounded and captured, in the disastrous Gallipoli and Mesopotamian campaigns, and finally reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel. With his friend T. E. Lawrence, with whom he had a great deal in common, he negotiated the surrender to the Turks of the British garrison at Kut in Mesopotamia (now Iraq). As a Conservative MP from 1911 to his death in 1923, he was instrumental in gaining independence for Albania. He was twice offered and twice refused the throne of that country. Toward the end of his life he became totally blind.
Herbert’s distinguished family was descended from the 17th-century metaphysical poet and clergyman George Herbert. His father—who had inherited 36,000 acres of land in Somerset, Hampshire and Nottinghamshire—was Colonial Secretary in the cabinets of Derby and Disraeli, and became Viceroy of Ireland in 1885. His oldest son, the 5th Earl, helped discover the fabulous treasures in the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun in Egypt. Aubrey inherited a country house, Pixton Park in Somerset, and a villa in Portofino on the Italian Riviera.
Born with a congenital malformation of his eyes, Herbert could see only a few yards ahead and nothing distinctly. At Eton he could not play sports, and had to have a private tutor to read to him and take dictation. Disabled and vulnerable, he often had his top hat smashed and was cruelly bullied by loutish classmates. In Germany in 1897, two operations on his right eye dramatically improved his vision and gave him limited sight.
Over six feet tall and very thin, he had clear blue eyes, a long straight nose and cropped hair, and gestured wildly as he spoke. He went up to Balliol in 1898 and, constantly testing himself, was famous for boldly climbing college roofs, using only finger holds and scurrying like a monkey from ledge to ledge. After Oxford he became an honorary attaché in the British embassies in Tokyo and Constantinople. He learned Japanese, practised wrestling (in which clear vision was not essential) and noted that his Japanese opponents sometimes politely fell down. He thought most ambassadors were glorified telegraph clerks with limited authority, who constantly sought orders from their superiors in London, and he was not interested in pursuing a diplomatic career.
He then traveled widely in the Middle East. In 1905 he made a dangerous journey to war-torn Sanaa in Yemen, where he caught typhoid by drinking water from an infected well. After he spent three weeks crossing the Syrian desert from Baghdad to Damascus, his Circassian friend wondered, “Oh my lamb, what wild deeds are these?” He now spoke—in addition to the major European languages—Turkish, Arabic, Albanian and Greek. He was the model for Sandy Arbuthnot, the hero in John Buchan’s popular novel Greenmantle (1916): a master of foreign tongues and exotic disguises, a death-defying adventurer who helps save the British Empire.
Herbert married Mary Vesey in 1910, and his biographer Margaret FitzHerbert (in The Man Who Was Greenmantle) quotes her saying, “Thank God Aubrey has forgotten about the Scilly Islands [off the Cornish coast]. I should have felt branded with ridicule for life if we had honeymooned there.” They had a son and three daughters; one of them, Laura, married Evelyn Waugh in 1937.
Herbert had been unable to serve in the South African War yet, despite his blindness, sought active service in World War I. Knowing he could not pass the physical exam, when the war broke out in August 1914 he bought a military uniform, boarded a troopship for France and joined the Irish Guards as an interpreter. That same month he was wounded and recorded: “The man who finally got me was about 15 to 20 yards away; his bullet came into my side broken up. It was like a tremendous punch.” The Germans captured him during the retreat from Mons in Belgium, but the French liberated the hospital where he was a patient, and he was a prisoner for only three weeks. After recovering from his wound, he joined the Arab Bureau in Cairo, questioning Ottoman prisoners and deserters: Turks, Armenians, Albanians and Arabs.
In 1915 he was sent to Turkey as a liaison officer, interpreter and interrogator with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. Their landing at Gallipoli was opposed by the Turkish commander Mustafa Kemal, who later became Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. At Krithia on the plateau of the Gallipoli peninsula. 6,500 men died to gain 600 yards, ten lives lost for every blood-soaked yard. Herbert, with some difficulty, arranged a brief ceasefire to bury the rotting Anzac dead. Winston Churchill’s bold but ill-conceived campaign cost the Allies more than 250,000 casualties and a tremendous loss of prestige.
In 1916 Herbert was put in charge of naval intelligence in Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf, and endured the intense heat, swarms of disease-bearing flies and the thieving, murderous locals. (He did not share Wilfred Thesiger’s later admiration of the Marsh Arabs.) From early December 1915 to late April 1916, the 8,000-man British garrison under General Charles Townsend, in Kut on the Tigris River 100 miles south of Baghdad, was besieged by the Turkish army. Fifteen starving British soldiers were dying every day from scurvy, cholera and tropical diseases. Herbert and T. E. Lawrence were sent to Kut, first hoping for terms to lift the siege, then trying to get the best terms for surrender. The Turks were offered, rejected and loudly publicised the British bribes of one and then two million pounds. This degrading surrender was considered perhaps the worst British defeat in World War I. FitzHerbert states that when the Turks took Kut, the Arabs “were treated with full Turkish savagery. Many were hanged, more tortured and all pillaged.” Some 70 per cent of the British prisoners taken at Kut died on the march to Baghdad or in captivity. Herbert was able to return to London, where he risked a court martial for criticising the incompetent conduct of the Mesopotamian campaign. Eventually he succeeded in persuading Asquith’s Government to appoint a Special Commission to investigate.
Beginning with the Peace Conference in 1912 after the First Balkan War, in which Turkey lost most of its territory in Europe, Herbert worked energetically and effectively for Albanian freedom. Its complex and tangled history resembled Lord Palmerston’s description of the Schleswig-Holstein Question: “Only three people have ever really understood the business—the Prince Consort, who is dead; a German professor, who has gone mad; and I, who have forgotten all about it.”
In the early 20th century there were 1½ million Albanians: 70 percent were Muslims, 20 percent Orthodox Christians and 10 percent Roman Catholics. The Ottomans ruled the country from 1431 until 1912, when it first became an independent state. Under their comparatively gentle government, many Albanians served as soldiers in the elite Janissaries and some achieved high office.
After World War I Albania was constantly in danger of being dismembered and obliterated by powerful invaders. The south was occupied by French and Italians, the north by Austrians and Bulgarians. In November 1913 Prince William of Wied— from a minor German state in the Rhineland and the 37-year-old second cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm II—was named the first monarch of Albania. He arrived in March 1914, with no prior knowledge of the country; Herbert called him hopelessly pretentious and inept. After six months Muslim rebels drove him out. He never returned.
Herbert made eight trips to Albania between 1907 and 1918. He praised the people for their physical beauty and fighting ability, and liked the thrill of danger that was always present in their blood-stained mountains. Just as Lord Byron had admired his companion Vasilly, who served him with feudal fidelity, so Herbert esteemed the wild highlander Kiazim, his longtime servant and bodyguard. Kiazim sacrificially told Herbert, “if he forgets anything or fails in his duty his master must stab him.” Later on, when they met by chance on a ship to Bushire in Persia, Kiazim exclaimed, “Oh, the wonders of God that thou and I should meet upon a strange sea.”
Herbert was notoriously pro-Albanian and pro-Turk, anti-Zionist and anti-Armenian. But FitzHerbert notes that Herbert, “though well accustomed to Balkan atrocities, had been horrified and disgusted by the Armenian massacres”. (Now recognized as a genocide, the Ottoman Turks massacred about a million Armenians.)
In 1920, partly through the efforts of Herbert and the influence of President Woodrow Wilson, Italy withdrew its wartime troops from Albania and recognized its independence. When Albania became a member of the League of Nations her own nationhood was finally assured, and Herbert felt he had achieved his main goal. In Albania: The Rise of a Kingdom (1929) John Swire concludes that “Aubrey Herbert had worked indefatigably in the cause of Albanian independence and was largely responsible for the existence of Albania.”
After years of political turmoil, Ahmed Zogu proclaimed himself King Zog and ruled as a dictator from 1928 to 1939. The Italians occupied the country from 1939 to 1943, and withdrew after the fall of Mussolini. From 1943 to 1944 the German invaders replaced them. From 1944 to 1981, under the dictator Enver Hoxha, Albania became a Communist satellite of the Soviet Union, deliberately cut off from the rest of the world. Hoxha was followed by Ramiz Alia from 1982 to 1989, when a revolution overthrew the Communist regime. During the Marxist-Leninist era, Herbert—as an aristocrat, Conservative MP and British intelligence officer—became an unperson and all the memorials to him were effaced. In 1991 a partial democracy was restored and multi-party elections were held. Albania is now a member of NATO and a candidate for the European Union.
Herbert and T. E. Lawrence, eight years younger, had striking similarities. Both came from upper class backgrounds (Lawrence’s father was Sir Thomas Chapman) but were plagued by inherited afflictions: Herbert was nearly blind, Lawrence was shamefully illegitimate. Both were highly intelligent and took Firsts at Oxford. The nomadic life, the sounds and smells of the East, enchanted them. They constantly tested themselves with dangerous exploits and took arduous desert journeys. They worked together at the Arab Bureau in Cairo, at the siege of Kut in Mesopotamia and at the 1919 Peace Conference in Paris. They wore slovenly military dress, and were notorious for their eccentric and defiant behavior, yet Herbert became a lieutenant-colonel and Lawrence a full colonel. They were friends of the diplomat Ronald Storrs and the writer and traveller Gertrude Bell, who played a key role in the creation of Iraq. Both men had a direct line to powerful generals and politicians in high office. Lawrence was called “the uncrowned king of Arabia”; Herbert actually was the uncrowned king of Albania. Herbert died aged 43; Lawrence died in a motorcycle accident aged 47. Lawrence, a victorious military leader widely publicised by Lowell Thomas, is world famous. Herbert, despite his formidable achievements, is almost forgotten.
At first they approached each other warily. Herbert ambivalently described Lawrence (who, unlike him, was short) as “an odd gnome, half cad—with a touch of genius.” In 1915 Lawrence wrote to his mother from Cairo: “Then there is Aubrey Herbert, who is a joke, but a very nice one: he is too short-sighted to read or recognise anyone: speaks Turkish well, Albanian, French, Italian, Arabic, German. . . . He fought through the Yemen wars, and the Balkan wars with the Turks and is friends with them all.” Both men took up the cause of people oppressed by the Ottomans: Albanians and Arabs. They vehemently opposed the secret 1915 Sykes-Picot Treaty—co-signed by Herbert’s close friend Mark Sykes—which divided the postwar Middle East between Britain and France.
In his diary of 1915 Herbert angrily blamed the French but not the British: “This is a war for liberty and small peoples, not for French financiers. I want to see the French out of Syria; Syria independent.” In 1920 Lawrence had helped to place on the throne of Syria his wartime ally Prince Feisal, who was soon driven out by the French and given Iraq instead by the British. Thinking of himself as well as his friend, Herbert wrote: “Many of the English were furious with Lawrence, who had made Feisal and the Arab cause entirely his own. If you take any Englishman and put him in loco parentis to a small nation, he very soon adopts it.” They often dined together during the Paris Conference, mocking and condemning the hypocrisy and greed of their fellow peacemakers.
When Herbert anonymously published his diary-memoir Mons, Anzac and Kut (1919) — which should more accurately have been titled Mons, Gallipoli and Kut — Lawrence, while writing his masterpiece Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926), flattered him with a notable proviso, “it is the best book on the war hitherto.” In 1923 Herbert sent Lawrence extracts of his book Ben Kendim (Turkish for “I Myself” and published in 1925), a record of his travels in Arabia and the Balkans. Lawrence sent him valuable advice about how to make essential revisions: “I don’t know what to liken it to — perhaps an Egyptian necklace of figured beads, whose string has snapped — it’s beautiful stuff (Persian Gulf and Riza [in Persia] better than Yemen), the best material for a book that ever was, but it’s not a book yet. In your place I’d retire to a solitary place and have the stuff read to me by a slave, again and again. Then I’d dismiss the slave and dream over those times until all the adventures came together. Then I’d dictate a slow story of my progress. . . . This advice is presumptuous, from me to you: but it is so very good that I long to see you make more of it.”
In November 1922 Lawrence confessed that he’d secretly and punitively signed up as a private soldier to escape his all-devouring fame: “I went off some months ago and enlisted as the surest and cheapest way out of politics. . . . I can only get out of sight in the ranks and under another name” — T. E. Shaw. In February 1935, three months before his own death, Lawrence mourned the loss of close comrades: “Some friends of mine, in dying, have robbed me: [the archeologist] D. G. Hogarth and Aubrey Herbert are two empty places which no one and nothing can ever fill.” The romantic and chivalric Herbert and Lawrence were both memorialised with life-size recumbent sculptures, like those of crusading knights, on their tombs in Somerset and Dorset.
Herbert was first offered the kingdom of Albania in May 1913 during the second Balkan conference in London. FitzHerbert explains the attraction and difficulty: “He was an English aristocrat, a Christian, neither Catholic nor Orthodox, with a deep understanding of and admiration for Islam. He knew the country and the language, and had no great responsibilities or possessions to tie him to England. To Aubrey’s romantic nature the appeal of thrones, chieftains, bandits, dangerous territory and fierce loyalties was almost irresistible. He could, however, see that the financial drawback was insurmountable. He was not only expected to support himself, but also to invest his own money in the kingdom. Quite simply, he was not rich enough to be king and would not be a king in rags.”
That same month he told his younger brother Mervyn, “Of course with me money is the trouble. The Albanians have never paid any taxes and even if they do, poor lambs, they can’t pay much.” He feared he would be an impoverished monarch, unable to live in regal style or even support his family. He also wondered if he’d be justified in accepting the kingdom that really belonged to the unfortunate William of Wied, and was told that neither the prince nor his children would ever return. But he did not receive the necessary assurances and had to refuse the first offer.
In September 1920, soon after the Paris Conference and Albania’s independence, Herbert was offered the crown for the second time. Still seeking financial guarantees, while suggesting he was the perfect candidate and aware that the sacrifice outweighed the reward, he told the Albanian officials: “it is not as easy as you think to get Englishmen of the kind you want. They have mostly got possessions, a family, a secure position, and are fond of their own country. They are to give up all this to receive a precarious title.”
He wrote to the Scottish Duke of Atholl, another potential candidate, “I admit that the offer which I had held considerable attractions for me. I have known the people for a long time and like them.” Slightly joking about the powerless position, he told Mervyn: “The Albanians have invited me to be No.1 big man. If it comes and comes with guarantees, I will do my best. I am very fond of the particular people and said I was touched and honoured.” Keen on the offer, Mervyn urged him to accept if he could get the proper assurances: “it would be just the thing you would like for a time—but it is bound to be full of bitterness and disappointment unless you get really sincere promises of support—in the first place [from Britain]”. But the Albanians, after the débâcle of the short-lived Wied, wanted a permanent, not a temporary, monarch; and their promises, though sincere, were not binding.
Herbert knew that trying to rule the Albanians—whose country was deeply divided by geography, religion and dialect, as well as by feuds of north and south—was like trying to control the tides. In September 1920 he told the Albanians: “It was difficult to give an answer without knowing what the conditions would be, but I would be ready to go there as governor for a limited number of years. . . . Albanians were very difficult people to govern, and I felt no inclination to become a second Wied.” Well aware of the dangers, he referred to the henchman of the Ruritanian prince in Anthony Hope’s popular novel The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) and to Gabriele D’Annunzio, the Italian warrior who seized and held Fiume (today Rijeka, Croatia) for fifteen months in 1920. Herbert declared, “I did not want to have the Rupert of Hentzau business—it was too like D’Annunzio.” He also recalled that Maximilian, Archduke of Austria, had assumed the crown of Mexico in 1863 and been executed by the Mexicans in 1867. Despite the perils, Lawrence thought Herbert would accept the tempting offer and be able to control the tide: “Albania seems to be revolting in several ways at once, and Aubrey will probably assume the crown [in] a few weeks,” though it’s not at all clear what he hoped to achieve in a limited time.
Three years later, in August 1923 and only a month before his untimely death, Herbert recorded that his great friend, the Albanian Foreign Minister Mehmed Konitza, said he could have a third shot at the crown: “He thought in the end they would again come to me and that, as politics are changed now, would I take it? I said I was more inclined to take it now than I had been before, but I could not do it without backing from home and should have to see Stanley Baldwin,” then Prime Minister. Herbert contacted Maurice Hankey, the influential Cabinet Secretary, who said the British had too many commitments in Ireland, Mesopotamia and elsewhere, and that Herbert could not expect financial or military support.
When Konitza lost his government post Herbert’s last chance of the Albanian throne disappeared. In the end, his own financial problems together with Albania’s dismal history, bellicose people, unstable government, massive corruption, threats of invasion and lack of assistance from Britain led Herbert to reject pomp, prestige and a unique position in modern Europe.
In 1922 Herbert’s serious visual problems recurred when the retina of his right eye became detached. He could see only dimly and depended on the blurred use of his left eye. An oculist finally removed his right eye, hoping to strengthen the left one, but the operation failed and for the last nine months of his life he remained totally blind: “Irrevocably dark, total eclipse.” In September 1923 the Master of Balliol, Arthur Smith, urged Herbert to have all his teeth extracted in the erroneous belief that the condition of eyes and teeth were closely linked. This pointless operation led to an infection and blood poisoning, which proved fatal. At the same time his duodenal ulcer ruptured, he dashed from Somerset to a London hospital and died there on September 23. It was bitterly ironic that Aubrey Herbert perished needlessly after surviving all the diseases and dangers of the desert, and the battles in Mons, Gallipoli and Kut.
Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has had 33 of his 54 books translated into fourteen languages and seven alphabets, and published on six continents.
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