The Foreign office and the 'Abyssinian captives'

Hoisting the banner of St George on the mountains of Rasselas seemed a good thing to most of Disraeli's countrymen in the spring of 1868. A British consul, a special agent of the Bombay government's Aden establishment, and a number of laymen and missionaries, among them British subjects, were rescued from a mountain prison, and Theodore, the apparently mad ruler of Abyssinia (as Ethiopia was then known), committed suicide. All this for a cost of something like £9,000,000. And, having marched his men to the top of the hill, Sir Robert Napier (soon to become Baron Napier of Magdala) marched them down again. Abyssinia remained chaotic but free, and British relations with it returned to normal, that is to say the Foreign Office ceased to regard it except under compulsion.