It did not help Jardine and Matheson’s cause that the new superintendent, succeeding Napier, was a longtime Company man named John Davis who stiffly objected to their demand for reparations. He also detested them as a group—as one of his correspondents explained to Palmerston’s undersecretary, Davis was “disgusted with the vulgar rabble of free-traders into whose hands Lord Napier was indiscreet enough to throw himself, and which in a great degree caused his ruin.”32 Davis had been one of George Staunton’s underlings on the Amherst mission in 1816, back when he was just a junior member of the factory, and the two had stayed close friends. A capable linguist, Davis had followed Staunton’s example, though his interests tended more toward the translation of Chinese literature—poetry and fiction, mainly—rather than anything overtly political or (as some would have it) “useful.” In 1829, he had published an ambitious two-volume translation of a classic Chinese novel, which he dedicated to George Staunton from “his very faithful friend and servant.”33 By 1834, Davis had become chief of the factory—the very last one, as it turned out. Nevertheless, he still got to be Napier’s second on the new committee of superintendents, and when Napier died he took his place.34
Davis subscribed fully to Staunton’s views on the China trade, especially his insistence that it should be conducted with caution and respect. Just a few days after Napier’s death, Davis wrote to Staunton to tell him, in effect, that his failed parliamentary speech from 1833 had just been vindicated. Though Staunton had called for a gradual change to the system, one predicated on discussion and agreement with the Chinese authorities, Charles Grant had gleefully ignored Staunton’s counsel and sent Napier straightaway to his doom. “Grant will learn that it had been better to have followed your advice,” Davis confided, “and have had some previous negociation between the Govts.” Davis himself had ridden on one of Napier’s gunboats—a terrifying experience in which a man standing near him was killed—and he pointed out how useless the resort to force had been. The showdown accomplished nothing, and Napier still wound up following the governor-general’s original orders to go back to Macao. Davis had little regard for the late superintendent. “Poor Lord Napier was very headstrong, and quite beyond the reach of advice,” he told Staunton. “His was one of the weakest minds I ever met with.”35
When Jardine and Matheson’s faction sent their petition calling for war, Davis chased it with a report of his own, written in his new capacity as chief superintendent, in which he advised Palmerston to ignore them. “The crude and ill-digested Petition to His Majesty from a portion of the English traders at Canton (for some of the most respectable houses declined signing it),” he wrote, “is said to have been drawn up by a casual visitor from India, totally unacquainted with this country.”36 To judge by Palmerston’s lack of response to the petition, Davis’s words carried the day.
Davis, incidentally, was far more optimistic than the signatories of Jardine and Matheson’s petition that the British could find a peaceful way out of the embarrassment Napier had caused. Knowing that the British government wanted “to avoid . . . a serious rupture with this country,” Davis told Palmerston that a recent edict had made it clear that the Daoguang emperor also wanted to avoid any serious troubles.37 Daoguang, he was pleased to report, had blamed the Napier affair not on the British but on the Hong merchants. The emperor had even expressed a measure of sympathy for the foreign traders, suggesting that they had been driven to “stir up disturbances” by the insufferable “grasping” of the Hong merchants.38 As with the embarrassment of the Amherst mission, which Jiaqing had blamed publicly on his own ministers rather than the British ambassador, the Daoguang emperor likewise chose to assign blame for Napier internally rather than casting the British as some kind of enemy. In both cases, the way was thus paved for trade at Canton to resume as nor mal with no lingering mistrust directed at the British merchants. And indeed, after Napier’s death that is exactly what happened.
Jardine and Matheson did not give up so easily, though. In March 1835, James Matheson had to sail home for medical treatment, and he took the occasion to escort Lord Napier’s remains back to Scotland for reburial. He was adopting a pastoral role toward the family that Jardine had first established with Napier himself in Canton and continued with Napier’s widow and her daughters as they grieved in Macao. (“Mr. Jardine will do anything to meet my wishes,” wrote Lady Napier to a confidant in Scotland a few weeks after her husband’s death. “I must ever be grateful to that gentleman . . . his kindness to me [has] been very great indeed.”)39 Jardine and Matheson raised some funds from their colleagues to build a monument to Napier in Macao, and Matheson planned to get the stone for it carved in England. Medical treatment aside, Matheson’s most conspicuous role back home would be to advise Lady Napier, who had sailed home a few months earlier with her daughters, and to help her ensure a proper commemoration of Lord Napier’s sacrifice. His less conspicuous role, intimately related to the former, was to insinuate himself as a representative of the family and use Napier’s death as the casus belli to drum up support for a punitive expedition against China.
Once home, however, Matheson had a difficult time getting the attention of the government. Palmerston was occupied with other matters—China almost never commanded his focused attention—and Matheson kept getting put off in his efforts to meet with him. He wrote in dismay to Jardine that waiting for an audience with the foreign secretary was like waiting for a mandarin at the Canton city gate.40 Having spent years as one of the largest fish in the small pond of the Canton factories, James Matheson held the China trade in the center of his worldview. Its problems dominated his mental landscape, so it was disorienting to find that back home nobody seemed to care about it. “The fact is, Jardine,” he wrote, “people appear to be so comfortable in this magnificent country, so entirely satisfied in all their desires, that so long as domestic affairs, including markets, go right, they really cannot be brought to think of us outlanders.”41 The only thing that might make them snap to attention, he suggested, was if the China market should somehow run aground—if the import of tea should be interrupted, if the London merchants should suffer financial losses. Short of that, he told Jardine, “expect no sympathy here.”
Matheson had no influence in the British government, but fortunately for him Lady Napier did. Palmerston had given the late superintendent’s widow permission to address him at any time—a polite act of solicitation, perhaps, but she availed herself of it on numerous occasions to lobby for family friends and plead for greater recognition of her husband’s service.42 On July 14, 1835, she wrote an effusive letter to Palmerston introducing “my friend Mr. Matheson” and urging the foreign secretary to meet with him privately. Matheson was, she told Palmerston, “a man of the highest respectability—and of very superior intelligence and what he says may be depended upon.” She described him as one of the top merchants in Canton, who had treated her husband Lord Napier warmly and “allowed no selfish or temporary interests to interfere with what he considered the liberal and true policy of England.”43 (By which she meant that Matheson and Jardine were among the few British merchants who did not tell Napier to give up and go back to Macao.) She would be deeply gratified, she said, if Palmerston would meet with him to learn the true state of affairs in China.
Matheson was using her—just as Jardine had used her husband to further his own ends in Canton—but underneath his business-related calculations his concern for Lady Napier was not entirely cynical. In a private letter to Jardine just after he first visited the widow at the looming mansion in Scotland where she stayed, Matheson showed a glimmer of genuine emotion. He described the shattered family: proud Lady Napier, broken in a way he was “grieved to see”; a glimpse of the uncertain new lord (“a dark lanky youth of sixteen”); Napier’s eldest daughter, “pale and thin” from her ordeals. For their part, the Napier family never seemed to question the motives behind Jardine and Matheson’s attentions to them. Napier’s daughters told Matheson how fondly they rem
embered William Jardine, and one let on that she was stitching a pocketbook for him. (“But this is a secret,” Matheson told Jardine, “and I promised not to tell you.”)44 His affection for the family, it would seem, was real. His desire for a war, however, was equally real.
Lady Napier’s introduction finally opened the door for Matheson to meet with Lord Palmerston privately after nearly a month of waiting. Even then, however, it did not accomplish what he hoped, for Palmerston was hardly inclined to follow his advice. “Lord Palmerston. I have had an audience with him,” he wrote curtly to Jardine afterward. “He has not had time to look into Chinese affairs, but the bent of his mind is not to interfere at present, but give time to see how the free trade will work on its present footing.”45 There would be no punitive expedition. Like the ministers of every British government before him, Palmerston trusted that the distant Canton trade would regain its balance naturally and the best course to follow was noninterference. It was not what James Matheson wanted to hear. It was, however, consistent. London and Beijing had in common that they had always preferred to let Canton take care of itself.
As it happened, Matheson was not working entirely alone. During the same months he was trying to get his foot into the door of Palmerston’s office, Hugh Hamilton Lindsay, the former Company supercargo who had chartered the Lord Amherst, was also in London trying to get Palmerston’s ear for nearly the same purpose. Unlike Matheson, Lindsay was not an opium dealer (not yet, at least)—he was just a free trader at heart whose views all along had been more aggressive than the other East India Company men with whom he served. While Matheson was in London, Lindsay was there as well, sending long letters to Palmerston and seeking audiences of his own, giving similar arguments for why Napier’s death was sufficient grounds for Britain to send a war fleet to Canton.
Matheson and Lindsay do not appear to have coordinated their efforts in any deliberate way, but they both shared the patronage of Lady Napier behind the scenes. Her husband had admired Lindsay’s account of the Lord Amherst on his voyage out, and it had greatly influenced his view that China could easily be forced open. Lady Napier recognized that debt, though she preferred to view it in the opposite direction, and wrote to Lindsay with delight that his proposals to Palmerston were the very same that Lord Napier would have made, had he lived long enough—she was gratified, she said, to see in Lindsay’s advice to Palmerston “proof of Lord Napier’s sagacity and judgment that he should this early have seen what was the proper course to be pursued by this country.” She supported Lindsay fully in his call for a war in the name of her husband, declaring that “if some show of apology is made, if we succeed in obtaining a commercial treaty, encreasing trade, intercourse, civilization and in God’s good time Christianity will follow, and it will not be altogether in vain that Lord Napier sacrificed his health and life in the path he considered his duty and for his Country’s advantage.”46
James Matheson returned to China in the summer of 1836, empty-handed save for an extremely heavy marble column carved in honor of the late Lord Napier that would take 120 years to finally get erected.47 Before leaving England, however, he planted a seed: a hundred-page pamphlet titled The Present Position and Prospects of the British Trade with China, the product of months of labor and research, in which he laid out the history of trade with China and made a strenuous case for the necessity of a British naval expedition. Having failed in the halls of government, he aimed instead for the public. Matheson started right off by describing the Chinese as “a people characterised by a marvellous degree of imbecility, avarice, conceit, and obstinacy” who nevertheless were blessed with the possession of “a vast portion of the most desirable parts of the earth.”48 His underlying argument was that such a people had no right to keep their “desirable parts” from the British; China must be opened or there would be no further trade at all.
He asked his readers to sympathize with the “intense anxieties, sufferings, and dangers” of their countrymen (like himself) who had long dared to engage in the China trade. They were “daily subjected to injuries and insults not merely of a harassing, but even of a horrible description.” The Chinese called the British barbarians and looked down on them. Napier, he wrote, was “our unoffending representative,” who was “destroyed” by his treatment at the hands of the Chinese. The British nation and its sovereign had been, through Napier, “treated with such disdain, and visited with such injuries, as they have never hitherto experienced, or chosen to endure.” In all, he urged that the British government must take action for the sake of free trade and national dignity—the people of Britain must vindicate “our insulted honor as a nation,” or else, in a dark reference to the kowtow, humble themselves “in ignominious submission, at the feet of the most insolent, the most ungrateful, the most pusillanimous people upon earth.”49
Lindsay, too, took his case to the public by publishing one of his letters to Lord Palmerston advocating war—though he refused to call it a “war” because he was so confident that it would be short, inexpensive, and would succeed without embroiling the British in any kind of long-term conflict with China or harming the future trade (which, he promised, was “capable of almost unlimited increase”). Napier may have made mistakes, he acknowledged, but “the Chinese were predetermined to insult him.” Lindsay denounced their “treacherous conduct” during Napier’s evacuation from Canton, “which may justly be considered to have hastened, if not caused, his death.” Britain had only two choices, he proposed: either to withdraw all political relations from China, or (his preferred approach) “a direct armed interference to demand redress for past injuries, and security for the future.” Lindsay saw ample justification for the latter, on the grounds that “Lord Napier’s death, when sent as the representative of our sovereign, was hastened, if not caused, by the treacherous and cowardly conduct of Chinese authorities.”50 They might as well have murdered him in cold blood.
The nearly simultaneous appearance of their pamphlets—Lindsay’s the more bellicose, Matheson’s the longer and more deeply thought out—made a strong case for a tightly focused war of retribution. To readers with slim knowledge of the actual course of events in China (most readers, that is), the case would seem fairly clear-cut. Britain had been wronged, its representative essentially murdered by arrogant Chinese officials who called him a “Barbarian Eye.” But the nation’s honor could easily be redeemed by dispatching a small fleet of ships that were already available to sail from India at little cost. And in the course of avenging their national honor, the British could advance their trade in China immeasurably, all with little or no risk at all. The picture Lindsay and Matheson drew was a tempting one.
It was George Staunton who came out to silence them. In response to their pamphlets advocating war, Staunton printed a tract of his own pointing out just how wrong—and more to the point, how “mischievous and dangerous”—Lindsay and Matheson’s seductive views really were. Their claims that Britain could prevail with a small fleet were absurd, he said—considering the vast length of China’s coastline, “a more gigantic and portentous scheme of national warfare cannot well be imagined.” Beyond just dismissing the absurdity of Matheson and Lindsay’s proposals for how a war with China should be conducted, Staunton especially deplored the grounds for why they thought Britain must fight. China was not some enemy, he said, but “a friendly power, with which, for upwards of an hundred years, we have carried on a most beneficial commercial intercourse.” Furthermore, Lord Napier was not some innocent but an aggressor who fell on his own sword. The actions of the Chinese, as Staunton saw them, had been both predictable and reasonable when Napier so recklessly ordered his gunboats to force the passage of the Tiger’s Mouth. Faced with “a couple of French frigates forcing their way up the Thames, and battering down Tilbry Fort,” he offered, Britain would have done exactly the same.51
As for Lindsay and Matheson’s predictions of the great expansion of trade that would follow from a treaty secured by war, Staunton acknowledged th
at of course it would be advantageous to have more ports in China opened to British trade. But, establishing himself as the voice of conscience toward China, he insisted that such concessions could only be granted voluntarily by the Chinese. There was no moral perspective from which an expansion of commerce by violence and war (or as it would later be known, “gunboat diplomacy”) could, on the grounds offered by Matheson and Lindsay, be justified. It would “reflect only disgrace and discredit on our flag and name,” he wrote, and alienate the British not only from the government of China but from its people as well. “To go to war—to engage in hostilities for the sake of obtaining such objects,—to endeavour to extort them by force from an independent state by the terror and sufferings which might arise to the people from our blockades and embargoes,” wrote Staunton in anger, “seems to me outrageous, and quite unparalleled in the records of the comparatively civilized warfare of modern days.”52
Imperial Twilight Page 37