“You Must Not Quarrel with Me if I Annex Egypt”
Much has been written about Winston Churchill’s unwavering devotion to T. E. Lawrence, who served as an adviser on Arab affairs during Churchill’s tenure at the Colonial Office.1 Little attention, however, has been given to Churchill’s relationship with the poet, orientalist, and anti-imperialist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. This is an odd oversight given Churchill’s prominence as a historical figure and the friendship Blunt also had with Churchill’s father Lord Randolph. Additionally, this omission is odd because their relationship raises interesting historical curiosities owing to their radically different political beliefs regarding the British Empire. That Blunt, a strong voice of anti-imperial dissent in British high society, would befriend Lord Randolph and later Winston Churchill, a die-hard imperialist in the 1930s, seems strange indeed.
The Avatar
Born in 1840 and raised in the Roman Catholic faith of his mother, Blunt was educated at Stonyhurst and St. Mary’s College. He served in the diplomatic service for eleven years before marrying a daughter of the Earl of Lovelace, whose maternal grandfather was Lord Byron. After extensive travels in the Middle East, the Blunts established a stud farm for Arabian horses at Crabbet Park in West Sussex.
By the 1880s Blunt had become “the avatar for anti-imperial causes” and, despite having shed his own religious faith, an active force for the “regeneration of Islam” by means of “agitation and negotiation as well as by poetry and horse breeding.”2 He used his horse breeding operations to disseminate his political views among his social connections in the influential horse-trading community, especially in high Tory circles where such views were not common.
Enraged by Prime Minister Gladstone’s decision for Britain to occupy Egypt in 1882, Blunt believed the policy to be one of fiscal self-interest and blatant imperialism. He published his own vision for the Levant in (1882). His far-sighted design foresaw the collapse of system, which split the administration of the Middle East into small manageable regions.
