"[4] Robert William Jameson started his career as an advocate in Edinburgh, and was Writer to the Signet, before becoming a playwright, published poet and editor of The Wigtownshire Free Press.

A radical and reformist, he was the author of the dramatic poem Nimrod (1848) and Timoleon, a tragedy in five acts informed by the anti-slavery movement.

There he rapidly acquired a great reputation as a medical man, and, besides numbering President Kruger and the Matabele chief Lobengula among his patients, came much into contact with Cecil Rhodes.

Colquhoun, went east to Manicaland and was instrumental in securing the greater part of the country, to which Portugal was laying claim, for the Chartered Company.

He affected an attitude of tough cynicism towards life, literature and any articulate form of idealism, particularly towards the hero-worship which he himself excited ... [After Starr's death,] The Times estimated that his astonishing personal hold over his followers had been equalled only by that of Parnell, the Irish patriot.

He was so logical and so quick to grasp a situation, that he would often cut short exposition by some forcible remark or personal raillery that would all too often quite disconcert the speaker.

Despite his adventurous career, mere reminiscences obviously bored him; he was always for movement, for some betterment of present or future conditions, and in discussion he was a master of the art of persuasion, unconsciously creating in those around him a latent desire to follow, if he would lead.

In this latter respect, Jameson was splendidly equipped; he had greater power of concentration, of logical reasoning, and of rapid diagnosis, while on his lighter side he was brilliant in repartee and in the exercise of a badinage that was both cynical and personal...

He wrapped himself in cynicism as with a cloak, not only to protect himself against his own quick human sympathy, but to conceal the austere standard of duty and honour that he always set to himself.

His whole life seems to illustrate the truth of the saying that in self-regard and self-centredness there is no profit, and that only in sacrificing himself for impersonal aims can a man save his soul and benefit his fellow men.

Cecil Rhodes, the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony and managing director of the company was eager to bring South Africa under British dominion, and encouraged the disenfranchised Uitlanders of the Boer republics to resist Afrikaner domination.

Rhodes hoped that the intervention of the company's private army could spark an Uitlander uprising, leading to the overthrow of the Transvaal government.

Chamberlain, at Highbury Hall, his home in Birmingham, received a secret telegram from the Colonial Office on 31 December informing him of the beginning of the Raid.

The trial lasted seven days, following which Dr Jameson was "found guilty and sentenced to imprisonment as a first-class misdemeanant for fifteen months.

According to Hawksley, these demonstrated that the Colonial Office 'influenced the actions of those in South Africa' who embarked on the Raid, and even that Chamberlain had transferred control of the Pitsani Strip to facilitate an invasion.

As he entered the court room a dark flush mounted to his forehead, which slowly faded as he walked to his chair and seated himself with great deliberateness.

He walked with a heavy un-elastic tread and a slightly swinging carriage, and sat much of the time obliquely in his chair, one cheek resting upon his elegantly gloved hand; his glance was often cast down or fixed at rare intervals upon his counsel, Sir Edward Clarke; not once during the day, so far as I could observe, did he give more than a passing look at the witnesses upon the stand; to whatever was being drawn out of them he seemed quite indifferent, and, except for that first dull flush, he was equally oblivious of the spectators about him to whom he was a manifest object of interest.

Such was the hero of one of the most daring raids in all the annals of border warfare; to all appearance a quiet, modest gentleman, in faultless and fashionable dress, with civilian stamped upon him from head to foot, and who would have been recognised anywhere as the circumspect, model family physician.

He seemed pre-eminently a man to whom healing of wounds was far more congenial and better suited than blood-letting with Maxim guns and Lee-Metford rifles, after the manner which he had so rashly undertaken.Jameson was sentenced to fifteen months in gaol, but was soon pardoned.

[3] In June 1896, Chamberlain, British Colonial Secretary of the day, offered his resignation to Lord Salisbury, having shown the Prime Minister one or more of the cablegrams implicating him in the Raid's planning.

Sir Leander Starr Jameson, 1st Bt., died on the afternoon of Monday, 26 November 1917, at his home, 2 Great Cumberland Place, Hyde Park, in London.

In 2002, The Van Riebeck Society published Sir Graham Bower’s Secret History of the Jameson Raid and the South African Crisis, 1895–1902,[15] adding to growing historical evidence that the imprisonment and judgment upon the Raiders at the time of their trial was an underhand move by the British government, a result of political manoeuvres by Joseph Chamberlain and his staff to hide his own involvement and knowledge of the Raid.