705. Queen Victoria’s Revenge: The Mad Emperor of Abyssinia (Part 1)
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Who was Emperor Tewodros II and why did he imprison British envoys?
At Suez, one of our navy sloops will take you down the Red Sea. They'll have you at Zula, that's the port for Abyssinar, by the middle of February, and it can't take above a week to get the silver up country to this place called Atagrat. That's where General Napier will be. Napia? Not Bob the bug hunter. What the blazes is he doing in Abyssinia? We haven't got a station there. Uh-huh! We have by now, you may be sure! He was laughing in disbelief. You mean to tell me you haven't heard? Why he's invaded the place with an army from India The silver is to help fund his campaign, don't you see? Good God, Flashy, where have you been? Held up. Hold up, can't you? Why is he invading? To rescue the captives Our consul, envoys, missionaries.
They're held prisoner by this mad cannibal king, and he's chainin' em and flogging em and kicking up no end of a row. Teodros his name is And you mean to say you've not heard of him? I'll be damned. Why, there's been uproar in Parliament Our gracious Queen writing letters a penny or more on the income tax It's true. So that is from a memoir by one of Victorian Britain's most decorated officers, General Sahari 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. 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.
Uh, and if you go to pretty much any of Britain's leading museums, so the British Museum, the British Library, the VA, the Bodleian, you will find uh 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 of his history and he will enjoy that that moment. So, yeah, those are treasures carried off by British troops after they stormed the mountain citadel of Magdala to rescue almost sixty European hostages that this Emperor, uh Theodore Toodros 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 recorded.
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 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 uh among the war correspondents who went 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 G. A. Henty. And Henty said this was an expedition to rank alongside the adventures of Hernan 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 kind of with Clive to Calcutta, with Hannibal across the Alps, all that kind of stuff. And it always involved
Yes, completely. Like King Solomon's Mines or something. The late Victorians and uh Edwardians, they love a journey. They love a quest and an expedition. And I think um the fact that Henty had been on this incredible, you know, this incredible Odyssey into the highlands of Abyssinia from the Red Sea coast undoubtedly informed um his writing.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who was Emperor Tewodros II and why did he imprison British envoys?
0:12–9:46
2
How did early British explorers like Walter Plowden shape Anglo‑Abyssinian relations?
9:46–19:03
3
What was Queen Victoria’s reply to Tewodros’s letter and why was it important?
19:03–26:13
4
How did Captain Charles Duncan Cameron become involved in the Abyssinian crisis?
26:13–35:29
5
Why were missionaries Henry Stern and Henry Rosenthal taken hostage by Tewodros?
35:29–45:01
6
What role did Hormuz Rassam play in the negotiations and the release of the captives?
45:01–53:22
7
How did the breakdown of diplomacy lead to the British Abyssinian Expedition of 1868?
53:22–1:01:21
8
What were the consequences of the Magdala campaign for Ethiopia and the British Empire?
1:01:21–1:09:38
Speakers
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