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CONSPIRACY and sex are at the heart of Robin Brown’s eye-opening The Secret Society — Cecil John Rhodes’s Plan for A New World Order. The author spent seven years researching Rhodes and his arch-imperialist acolyte, Alfred Milner, and has had access to sources unavailable to earlier biographers.

The existence of Rhodes’s Secret Society and the machinations of Milner and his Round Table — created after Rhodes’s death to perpetuate his legacy — are well-known. What is new in Brown’s book is his bold and confident claim that Rhodes’s ideals, expounded in his adolescent Confession of Faith and prolonged by his imperialist-minded successors, had so much impact — for good and ill — on 20th century history.

All previous biographers, the author declares, fitted Rhodes into a mould of their own making with scant regard for the facts, depicting him as a sickly child (which he wasn’t) sent out to SA for his health (which was generally robust until he began eating, smoking and drinking too much), who was cruelly cut down in his prime (at 49, he had lasted nine years longer than the average male of his time).

Rhodes’s obvious homosexuality, (which he never bothered to disguise), for which this book provides chapter and verse, was only hinted at obliquely in previous accounts rather than presented as a crucial element of his personality and make-up.

Rhodes believed that to be born an Englishman was to win first prize in the lottery of life. As an Oxford student imbued with the imperialist fervour of the Victorian age, he wrote: "Africa is still lying ready for us (and) it is our duty to take it.… More territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race, more of the best, the most human, most honourable race the world possesses."

In order to achieve this, after amassing one of the world’s largest fortunes, he formed a secret society along Jesuit lines with one objective: "The furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole civilised world under British Rule."

Details

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  • TITLE: The Secret Society - Cecil John Rhodes’ Plan For A New World Order
  • AUTHOR: Robin Brown
  • PUBLISHER: Penguin

Rhodes was on his way to achieving this aim in Southern Africa when the Jameson Raid brought him to his (political) knees. Here his sexuality was a major factor, according to the author. His relationship with the unmarried Leander Starr Jameson, with whom he enjoyed a "tender intimacy" and in whose arms he died, made him unable to criticise his partner for his arrogant folly. Not long afterwards, he appointed Jameson administrator of Rhodesia.

After Rhodes’s death, the imperialist baton was passed to Milner, who became executor of the former’s estate, chairman of the Rhodes Trust, and controller of a huge fortune, which he deployed to further the aims of Empire.

The Secret Society was transmuted into the Round Table, among whose members were one-time British prime ministers Lord Rosebery and Arthur Balfour, bankers such as Nathan Rothschild, and members of Milner’s "kindergarten" who had cut their teeth as administrators and propagandists of empire in SA. The Round Table’s goals, the author avers, were to rid the empire of "rottenness" and instil a "new world order".

In Victorian times, Brown argues, a "new world order" did not carry the sinister connotation the term does today. The imperialist conspiracies he has uncovered, he says, are backed up by the findings of Harvard scholar Carroll Quigley.

Quigley concluded that the Milner group influenced many events including the founding of the Union of SA and the British Commonwealth, and major British foreign policy decisions of the past century.

Bolstered by Quigley, the author makes remarkable assertions about the Round Table: that its offshoot, the Garden Suburb, effectively dictated Britain’s military strategy in the First World War; that David Lloyd George — regarded as one of Britain’s most effective prime ministers of the century — was little more than a puppet in Milner’s hands; that a "cadre of aesthetes, homosexual, bisexual and lesbian socialites", many of them members of the by now not-so-secret Round Table, dominated British politics in the first third of the 20th century and were craven appeasers of Adolf Hitler.

Even more startling are the disclosures, in German diplomatic papers released after the Second World War, of the extent of King Edward VIII’s pro-German sympathies and admiration for the Third Reich.

Brown argues Rhodes was many-sided and his legacy mixed. Brown is confident his disclosures will stand up to academic scrutiny, but emphasises that there is much more to be uncovered. If the author is to be believed, there is more to the story of Rhodes and Milner than has been told. Yet I remain to be fully persuaded. I’d like more research details than Brown reveals in his scant footnotes. Many assertions are made and conclusions drawn without supporting references, and there is no bibliography.

What must be said, however, is that by challenging the conventional wisdom about Rhodes, The Secret Society provides a stimulating and thought-provoking read.