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Source note Episode guide Original audio Topics: History

706. Queen Victoria’s Revenge: Storming the Citadel (Part 2)

Summary

This The Rest Is History episode closes the British Abyssinian expedition of 1868 that Part 1 left at the cabinet’s decision for war. It follows Sir Robert Napier from the 19 August 1867 cabinet meeting through the landing at Anersley Bay, the engineered march inland, the deal with Ras Kassa of Tigray, the Battle of Magdala, the release of Hormuzd Rassam and the other hostages, the death of Teodros II, the looting and auction of his citadel, and the withdrawal home.

The episode uses Flashman on the March as an opening hook while repeatedly stressing that the novel’s narrator is invented and the emperor, his mountain fortress, the expedition and the hostage crisis are documented. Its central argument is that the rescue was driven by imperial prestige as much as by humanitarian concern, and that a spectacular, narrow-aimed and brutally one-sided campaign succeeded at its stated task while leaving Abyssinia / Ethiopia leaderless for about twenty years.

Key Claims

  • By the summer of 1867 the crisis had run for roughly four years: Teodros II was furious that Queen Victoria had not answered his letters and held missionaries, Consul Charles Duncan Cameron and Foreign Office agent Hormuzd Rassam at Magdala.
  • On 19 August 1867 Lord Derby’s cabinet decided the situation could not stand, blamed the Liberals for leaving it unresolved, and feared humiliation in front of British subjects in India and South Arabia, especially Aden.
  • Indian authorities were put on alert and expected to meet the cost, a penny was added to income tax, and Napier, then commander-in-chief in Bombay, was appointed to lead the expedition.
  • Napier’s officers found almost no usable intelligence: the interior was unmapped, mountainous and unhealthy, and a report concluded there were “few countries about which we know less.”
  • Napier worked backwards from the rescue, planning for 5,000 men to extract the hostages, another 10,000 to guard supply lines, and a coastal base linked to Suez and Bombay.
  • The expedition was built as the most technologically ambitious military operation of its day, with railways, portable telegraphs, water pumps, flares, seven photographers, geographers, meteorologists, a geologist and an archaeologist, plus pressmen including Henry Morton Stanley and G. A. Henty, and 44 elephants shipped across the Indian Ocean.
  • Cash was as critical as weapons: the region’s preferred currency was the Austrian silver Maria Theresa Taler, and the Vienna mint produced 20,000 coins a week for the expedition while Napier’s agents bought up old coins across Central Europe.
  • The cost escalated from a budgeted £2 million to £4 million before departure and roughly £10 million in the end, and a Punch rhyme insisted that no expense should stand in the way of avoiding humiliation.
  • The force landed at Anersley Bay, now the Gulf of Zula in Eritrea, in the final week of October 1867; by the new year Britain had landed 13,000 soldiers, 20 miles of railway track and 44 elephants, then blasted cliffs to reach the highland plateau 8,000 feet above sea level before a further 350 miles to Magdala.
  • Crossing Ras Kassa’s Tigray, Napier offered full military honours, gifts and payment for every sack of grain in exchange for passage and weekly supplies, an arrangement the source presents as an unwritten bargain against their common rival.
  • Teodros II returned to Magdala in March 1868 with roughly 50,000 people and his heavy guns, including the 70-ton mortar Sebastopol, told his courtiers about a prophecy of a meeting between a European and an Ethiopian king, and resumed affectionate and then paranoid letters to Rassam.
  • After drinking heavily, Theodros had about 300 prisoners thrown over the cliff on the Thursday before Easter, then confessed to God in prayer that he had been drunk when he ordered it.
  • At the Battle of Magdala on Good Friday, 11 April 1868, Abyssinian guns proved so inaccurate that shells sailed over the British, one gun exploded, and the expected reload pause never came because British troops had Snider breech-loading rifles firing continuously across the line.
  • The battle cost Theodros just under 1,000 dead and thousands wounded against two British dead and about twenty wounded; it was also, according to the source, a case where at least part of a British army went into combat in khaki rather than red.
  • Shocked by the defeat, Theodros sent Rassam to seek terms, dictated no clear answer to Napier’s offer of honourable treatment, made a failed suicide attempt, and after the hostages were released tried to buy peace with 1,000 cows and 500 sheep, which Napier refused.
  • Napier’s officers did not want a second battle but feared that a return march would be attacked unless Theodros was finished off; on Easter Monday, 13 April 1868, British guns shelled the citadel, Theodros declared that he would never fall into an enemy’s hands, and shot himself with the silver duelling pistol Queen Victoria had given him.
  • British troops then looted manuscripts, relics, vestments, crowns, goblets, musical instruments, Staffordshire pottery, umbrellas, wine, carpets, lion skins, toy soldiers and cameras; Napier arrived with bands playing, ordered a proper distribution of the booty and held a gigantic auction a few days later.
  • Napier had no mandate to install a client regime: his orders were to get in, get the hostages and get out, and he told his army “we’ve done it, we’re going home.”
  • Abyssinia / Ethiopia was left leaderless and suffered around twenty years of chaos and civil war, running into the Sudan war of the Mahdi and General Gordon, and ending only at the end of the century under Menelik II, who beat the Italians at the Battle of Adwa in 1896.
  • Napier returned to the coast by June 1868, shipped the railway tracks, telegraph wire and elephants home, was thanked by Parliament, received by the Queen, promoted to Field Marshal and made Baron Napier of Magdala, and died in 1890; in Abyssinia / Ethiopia Teodros II is now remembered as a patriotic hero who died fighting European imperialism.

Key Quotes

“few countries about which we know less” - the conclusion of Napier’s officers’ report after they searched libraries in Bombay for material on Abyssinia.

“dash the expense, however immense, we can nothing cheaper than fight” - Punch rhyme quoted as evidence that losing face was treated as more costly than money.

“today we must all be English” - Theodros’s greeting to Rassam when he arrived back at Magdala in the storm.

“take leave of your families, for today you will have the honour to die with a king” - Theodros’s address to his loyalists before the Battle of Magdala.

“flee, I release you from your allegiance, but I shall never fall into the hands of an enemy” - Theodros’s last words before shooting himself in the citadel.

Connections

Contradictions

  • No settled contradiction with 705. Queen Victoria’s Revenge: The Mad Emperor of Abyssinia (Part 1). Part 2 completes the landing, march, assault, hostage release, death, plunder and withdrawal events that Part 1 explicitly deferred to the next episode.
  • The episode’s prestige-first reading is the hosts’ interpretation, not a documented cabinet record; the source itself marks such arguments as inference rather than fact, and humanitarian concern for the hostages remains part of the case.
  • Source-scope caution: casualty figures (two British dead and about twenty wounded, just under 1,000 Abyssinian dead, about 300 prisoners killed), the roughly £10 million final cost, the 20,000-talers-a-week mint output, and the 20 miles of railway are the episode’s figures and should not be treated as audited totals.
  • Source-scope caution: Theodros’s mental state is reconstructed from British, missionary and hostage accounts; the source itself offers grandiosity, drinking, isolation and paranoia as impressions rather than a diagnosis.
  • Source-scope caution: the account remains British and European in perspective. Ethiopian experience appears mainly through Theodros’s later memory as an anti-imperial hero and the single reference to Menelik II and Adwa.
  • Source-scope caution: Flashman is fiction. The episode stresses that Flashman’s mission is invented, so the wiki should not draw evidence from the novel’s scenes.