Queen Victoria’s Revenge: The Mad Emperor of Abyssinia (Part 1)

Tom Holland (0:11)

At Suez, one of our Navy sloops will take you down the Red Sea. They'll have you at Zola, that's the port for Abyssinia, by the middle of February. And it can't take above a week to get the silver upcountry to this place called Attegrat. That's where General Napier will be.

Napier? Not Bob the Bug Hunter? What the blazes is he doing in Abyssinia?

Dominic Sandbrook (0:36)

We haven't got a station there.

Tom Holland (0:39)

We have by now, you may be sure.

Dominic Sandbrook (0:42)

He was laughing in disbelief.

Tom Holland (0:44)

You mean to tell me you haven't heard? Why, he's invaded the place with an army from Indja.

The silver is to help fund his campaign, don't you see? Good God, Flashy, where have you been?

Held up? Held up, can't you?

Why is he invading?

To rescue the captives. Our consul, envoys, missionaries. They're held prisoner by this mad cannibaled king. And he's chaining them and flogging them and kicking up no end of a row. Tewodros his name is? And you mean to say, you've not heard of him? I'll be damned.

Dominic Sandbrook (1:24)

Why?

Tom Holland (1:24)

There's been uproar in parliament? Our greatest queen writing letters? A penny or more on the income tax?

It's true.

Dominic Sandbrook (1:34)

So that is from a memoir by one of Victorian Britain's most decorated officers, General Sir Harry Flashman VC.

Recalling his part in what he, in his memoir, calls the strangest campaign in the history of British arms. And this is the subject of today's episode and our next episode, the Abyssinian expedition of 1868 And I think it's fair to say that this isn't an expedition that is particularly well known, not one of the kind of the classic Victorian expeditions, but it is a banger. And if you go to pretty much any of Britain's leading museums, so the British Museum, the British Library, the V&A, the Bodleian, you will find manuscripts or relics or jewels or treasures that were brought back to Britain from this expedition. And Dominic, we get complaints sometimes, don't we, from Canadian listeners that we don't have enough mentions of Canada on this podcast. But I gather that some of this loot even found its way to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. So that's a lovely little nod to our Canadian listener, Mark Carney there. Because I know he's a big fan of The Rest Is History and he will enjoy that moment. So yeah, those are treasures carried off by British troops after they stormed the mountain citadel of Magdala to rescue almost 60 European hostages this Emperor Theodore Tewodros II was holding. And as you say, it's not a terribly well known Victorian escapade, but it is surely the maddest. So in Sir Harry Flashman's memoirs, he recalls, and I quote, The screaming charge of long haired warriors Swinging their hideous sickle blades against the Sikh bayonets The huge mound of rotting corpses under the precipice at Islamji The ghastly forest of crucifixes at Gondar Who doesn't love a ghastly forest of crucifixes? Right, exactly. Above all, he recalls, and I quote, The transformation of an Urbane cultivated monarch into a murderous tyrant Shrieking with hysterical glee as he slashed and hacked at his bound victims. I mean, I don't want to rain on the parade, but obviously, this is from a novel. Flashman isn't real. He's an invented character by George MacDonald Fraser for the avoidance of any doubt. But how much of this is exaggerated? How much is true, do we think? A little bit of it is exaggerated, but there's an awful lot of truth in this. So among the war correspondents who were embedded with the British troops, the British expedition that went to Magdala, one was Henry Morton Stanley, and another was the future Imperial novelist, GA. Henty.

Henty said this was an expedition to rank alongside the adventures of Ennan Cortez and Francisco Pizarro, which we've done on the show, and he's not wrong. Do you think this inspired him in his novels? Because as I remember, I read some of them. Yeah. They were always with Clive to Calcutta, with Hannibal across the Alps, all that stuff, and it always involved a journey. Yes, completely, like King Solomon's Minds or something. The late Victorians and Edwardians, they love a journey, they love a quest and an expedition. I think the fact that Henty had been on this incredible, this incredible odyssey into the highlands of Abyssinia from the Red Sea coast, undoubtedly informed his writing. There's something terribly tragic about this story, but something really thrilling about it as well. Abyssinia is Ethiopia, and Ethiopia famously is the country in Africa that was never colonized. Yeah, exactly. But interesting that the British do get there even so. Exactly. And Tom, you will know this better than anybody, well, anybody outside Ethiopia. It's also the second oldest Christian country in the world, isn't it, after Armenia. So I think it embraced Christianity in 330 AD. Though when Band-Aid asked, do they know it's Christmas? Yeah, they absolutely know it's Christmas. Absolutely did. They have done for much longer than we have. But after that, just to give people a sense, so Abyssinia as it was called in the 19th century, it became effectively cut off from the Mediterranean and the world that became Christendom, and so it became shrouded in mystery, and people in medieval Europe used to love the idea of Preston John, didn't they? This lost Christian king who might be in India, or he might be somewhere in Africa.