Company. For many weeks Jameson was moving backwards and forwards between Bulawayo, Johannesburg, Capetown, Kimberley, Mafeking, and Pitsani Potlugo, interviewing the various persons concerned in the prospective rising and arranging for common action. He seems to have become convinced that the Johannesburg rising could only succeed with his active intervention, and he took it as settled that the rising was to take place on a certain date at the end of December. As that date drew near, however, he began to feel, rightly or wrongly, that the reformers' counsels were divided and that, unless he himself took the initiative, their preparations would never be completed and the whole plan would end in fiasco. On 29 December, in spite of messages from Johannesburg and from Rhodes's subordinates at Capetown calling upon him to stay his hand, he entered on his famous ‘Raid’ by marching his force, under the military command of Sir John C. Willoughby, across the Transvaal border. It was doomed to disaster. Boer commandos gathered round it on its way. The force which Jameson expected to be dispatched by the reformers from Johannesburg to join hands with him was never sent, and Jameson's little band, after gallant fighting and heavy losses, was forced to surrender to the Boer commandant, P. A. Cronje, at Doornkop, fourteen miles from Johannesburg (2 January 1896).
The rash decision to invade the Transvaal, in defiance of all requests for delay, was Jameson's own, nor did he ever in after life seek to minimize his sole responsibility for it. Undoubtedly he underrated the military value of the Boer commandos, but he had often before dared and achieved the impossible. He felt that Rhodes, in his position as prime minister at Capetown, was in duty bound to tell him not to start, as no outbreak had occurred at Johannesburg, but that if he did not start against orders and succeed, a scheme on which Rhodes had set his heart would fail; whereas if he started and failed the consequences would fall upon himself alone. Afterwards he bitterly reproached himself for not having foreseen that Rhodes must be involved in those consequences.
Taken captive to Pretoria, Jameson and his officers were handed over to the British authorities and sent to England to be tried for an offence against the Foreign Enlistment Act. They were convicted, and Jameson with Willoughby was sentenced in July 1896 by the lord chief justice, Lord Russell of Killowen, to fifteen months' imprisonment, the other officers receiving shorter sentences. Broken in health by all the hardships which for years he had so cheerfully borne, Jameson nearly died in Holloway prison and was released after a few months (December 1896) in a condition of great physical weakness. His robustness never returned, but a long rest restored his activity and he was able in March and April 1897 to give his evidence before the parliamentary select committee which inquired into the origin and circumstances of the Raid. From that evidence it will be enough to quote one sentence: ‘I know perfectly well that as I have not succeeded the natural thing has happened; but I also know that if I had succeeded I should have been forgiven.’
The story of the remainder of Jameson's life is that of a marvellous recovery from a catastrophic fall. For two years he was travelling in Africa and in Europe and making some kind of return to health. Then upon the outbreak of the South African War (October 1899) he threw himself into Ladysmith. Here he nearly died of enteric fever, and was left after the relief of that town with a physique permanently broken, but with an unbroken and unbreakable spirit and with a fixed resolve to make amends for the past. In pursuance of this resolve he joined the board of De Beers Consolidated Mines and entered the Cape parliament as member for Kimberley in June 1900. He was content to sit silent under the taunts and abuse of opponents, who seemed to hold him answerable for all the troubles of South Africa, until October, when that parliament was prorogued, not to meet again till August 1902, after the close of the South African War. In March 1902 Rhodes died, and Jameson, who had nursed his friend devotedly, was left alone. But it was not long before he had succeeded him in the leadership of the progressive party at the Cape; and, his parliamentary silence once broken, he rapidly established his position in the House.
At the general election which followed the defeat of the ministry of Sir John Gordon Sprigg [q.v.] in 1903, Jameson's party obtained a majority of one in the legislative council and a majority of five in the assembly. It was a narrow majority indeed; and but for the fact that many of the Dutch voters in the Cape Colony had been disfranchised for
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