Imperial Twilight

by Stephen R. Platt

  Palmerston, for his part, offered a sneering dismissal of the resolution as “feeble in conception, and feebly supported,” a mere ploy to get the opposition into power. He defended Elliot’s “zeal, courage, and patience” and denied that the superintendent had in any way contributed to the opium problem, pointing to the dispatches in which Elliot complained of his unpopularity at Canton due to his opposition to the drug trade. Palmerston insisted that the war was entirely about the security of honorable, legitimate British commerce in China, and at the climax of his speech he brandished a letter signed that day by thirty London merchant houses begging him not to let Parliament interfere with the government’s plans for war—without which, they insisted, “the trade with China can no longer be conducted with security to life and property, or with credit or advantage to the British nation.” The signatories of that letter—whom he treated as representatives of the entire London business community—were not supporters of the Whigs, said Palmerston proudly. In fact, he said, “the majority of them are hostile to the Government generally” and therefore their strong support for the government’s war proved that it had the full and disinterested support of everyone with a stake in the China trade.20

  (Palmerston’s speech came at the end of the last night of the debate, so there was no chance for the members of the opposition to look into who exactly those thirty signatories were, but Hugh Hamilton Lindsay—one of the most long-standing champions of the war—was one of them. So were Jardine’s mentor Magniac and James Matheson’s nephew Alexander Matheson. Furthermore, contrary to Palmerston’s claim that most of the merchants who signed the letter were normally “hostile to the government,” in fact the opposite was true: twenty-five out of thirty were Whig supporters, and the few who weren’t nevertheless possessed sizable claims to the opium indemnity and thus would effectively be paid with the proceeds of the war.21 They were neither representative nor disinterested.)

  Other defenders of the ministry argued that the moral and health dangers of opium were exaggerated and it was no worse than alcohol. They spoke in racial terms: the Chinese were not some simple, honest people, but rather “possessed of great shrewdness and unscrupulousness in all their proceedings.”22 They spoke of honor, charging that a censure of Palmerston would “prostrate this country at the feet of Mr. Commissioner Lin.”23 They said the war would be brief and restrained, not cruel or excessive. They insisted that it was the only way to restore peace and prosperity to the Canton trade and cement the everlasting friendship of Great Britain and China.

  On the other side, lawmakers attacked the opium trade as one that “had been fostered for the love of gain, and by the misery of hundreds of thousands of human beings.”24 They quoted Palmerston’s instructions to Elliot in 1838 that “Her Majesty’s Government cannot interfere for the purpose of enabling British subjects to violate the laws of the country to which they trade”—instructions that Elliot had obviously ignored.25 The Chinese were a just and kind people, they insisted, pointing to the long peace and prosperity of the Canton trade. They railed against the prospect of making war on a poorly armed, nearly defenseless nation—a war with “a people who, as Captain Elliot described them, were anxious only for justice.”26 If Britain respected its own independence, asked one speaker, “ought we not to pay some regard to that of other nations?”27

  The most eloquent and impassioned speech of the long debate came from the young William Gladstone—later to be a four-time prime minister and one of the towering figures in nineteenth-century British politics, and at this time a thirty-one-year-old newlywed. In a debate marked to a great degree by hypocrisy and thinly veiled party spirit, Gladstone’s fundamental motives were moral. As he wrote in his diary at the time, “I am in dread of the judgements of God upon England for our national iniquity towards China.” His message was exceptionally controversial: that justice, in the coming war, would be on the side not of Britain but of China. Gladstone argued that Palmerston had been given more than sufficient grounds to put down the British side of the opium trade, yet neglected to do so, and as a result both the recent surge in opium imports from India and the war that seemed certain to result from that surge were Britain’s fault. He questioned whether Palmerston had even read the increasingly hysterical dispatches from Elliot predicting an outbreak of violence on account of the smugglers, for the foreign secretary had consistently “refused to grant him the power necessary to control the British subjects within the dominions of China.”28

  Pointing to the many edicts from the Daoguang emperor condemning opium, and the long run-up of suppression that began under Deng Tingzhen in 1837 and ramped up steadily for two years prior to Lin Zexu’s arrival, Gladstone offered that there was nothing at all “sudden” or “violent” about China’s crackdown on opium. Furthermore, the mere fact that so many low-level officials in China had been complicit in the opium trade did not mean the Chinese government sanctioned it—it meant only that the Chinese government suffered from corruption within its bureaucracy, as did many countries, which was no justification for British subjects to take advantage of the ease of breaking China’s laws.

  In a damning conclusion, Gladstone avowed that “a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know, and have not read of.” Hammering at the paradox that lay at the heart of Palmerston’s war—namely, that the nation responsible so recently for abolishing slavery was now going to war in support of drug dealers—he declared that the Union Jack inspired the national pride of his countrymen because it “has always been associated with the cause of justice, with opposition to oppression, with respect for national rights, with honourable commercial enterprize.” But now it would be raised in China “to protect an infamous contraband traffic.” If Britain’s flag should never fly again except as it was about to do in China, he concluded, “we should recoil from its sight in horror.”

  For George Staunton, the debate on the China war in 1840 was in many ways the event he had been preparing for his whole life (short of serving as an ambassador to China, that is, though that would never be his lot). Now—after all the hard-won Chinese language study that everyone had told him was useless, the lonely years of trade in the Canton factory, the two embassies to Beijing, the dry books on Chinese law and commerce, a lifetime spent building an unparalleled reputation for expertise on a part of the world most British found baffling and mysterious if they thought about it at all—now, almost fifty-nine years old, living on a country estate decorated with Chinese gardens and a moon bridge, Staunton was merely a quiet backbencher in Parliament, representing the naval center of Portsmouth. He had rarely spoken in the House of Commons since his humiliation in 1833 except to give brief support to the arguments of others. But the opium crisis finally brought China back to center stage in national politics, and George Staunton was—of all men in Britain, let alone in Parliament—the one person most widely trusted to judge what had gone wrong and what must be done to make it right again.

  The collapse of relations with China in 1839 was Staunton’s ultimate vindication. It was almost universally acknowledged, by critics and supporters of the government alike, that the problems at Canton traced back to the poorly managed ending of the East India Company’s monopoly, especially the unfortunate appointment of Lord Napier.29 Journalists and speakers in Parliament pointed back wistfully to Staunton’s failed resolutions of 1833—especially his warning that if Britain should open Canton to free trade without first negotiating a new system of relations with the Chinese government, it would lead to conflict. Here, they said, was the war Staunton had predicted. His words were “prophetic,” said the Times, which reprinted his resolutions in full for its readers in January 1840.30 In the opening speech of the China debate, James Graham said there wasn’t “any authority more entitled to weight and respect” than Staunton, whose “foresight which anticipated the future must be regarded with admiration.”31

  This was his time, and in it
Staunton finally found his voice. He had given a glimpse of his views two weeks earlier, during a debate on whether the government should honor Elliot’s pledges, where he pronounced himself strongly anti-opium. He argued that the India-China drug trade should be abolished once and for all by an act of Parliament and by “the good feeling of the people of this country.”32 He was also sharply critical of Charles Elliot. In his view, Elliot did actually have the power to prohibit the opium trade—the fact that he had successfully ordered the British to evacuate Canton and remove their trade after Lin lifted the siege proved he had that power. If Elliot had simply issued that order seven months earlier, Staunton maintained, then any losses would merely have been individual ones and there would have been no claims on the British government for compensation (and thus, of course, no prospect of a war).

  Late on April 7, Staunton stood in the crowded Commons Chamber to deliver his first proper speech since the one that had been cut off midstream in 1833. His fragile ego was buttressed by all of the references to him in the press as the one man in Britain who had foreseen everything that was unfolding. Due to the great importance of the debate, with a national war and the fate of the sitting government at stake, he had a larger and more attentive audience in the chamber than he had ever enjoyed before, or would again. Even in his peak of boldness, though, he was still much the same shy and awkward man he had always been. He spoke “feebly,” recalled one listener on the government’s side—but no matter that, for “his long residence in China gave him weight.”33 He was the expert, and they would listen.

  If Staunton had one chance to stop the war, this was it. The boy who had knelt before Qianlong and delighted the legendary old sovereign by speaking to him in Chinese; the young man who had successfully defended British sailors in a Chinese court; the defender of the East India Company and the older ways in Canton against the disorder and unrestrained greed of free trade; the voice of conscience who had opposed a war of vengeance for Lord Napier’s death, who declared in 1836 that to unleash Britain’s might against a defenseless China would be “outrageous, and quite unparalleled in the records of the comparatively civilized warfare of modern days”—that boy, that man, now had a pulpit, and a moment, from which he could steer Britain back toward a more peaceful and respectful relationship with the Qing Empire.

  Except he didn’t do that.

  Instead, Staunton spoke in favor of the war. He began by clarifying that he had not come to defend the smugglers who broke Chinese laws. Much less, he went on, would he ever defend the opium trade itself—indeed, he “yielded to no Member of the House in his anxiety to put it down altogether.” That said, however, in his reading of the documents provided to Parliament he had come to the conclusion—reluctantly, he said, and only for this one solitary instance—that a war against China was “absolutely just and necessary.” As he saw it, Lin Zexu was entirely in the wrong, and Britain could not allow him to get away with his provocations.

  In two hundred years of trade, said Staunton, the worst the Chinese had ever done to the British was to suspend commerce temporarily. But Lin Zexu had come suddenly to destroy that long-standing, peaceful pattern. British merchants certainly had no right to violate China’s laws, he said, but Lin had brought a “new law” to Canton all of a sudden and without warning, a new law “of a very extraordinary and severe character denouncing death against any foreigner who traded in opium.” The merchants were never given a choice whether to obey that law; rather, Lin had immediately applied it to everyone who had brought their opium to China under the old system. Smugglers who by precedent should have expected deportation at worst were thus suddenly threatened with execution. This was an “atrocious injustice,” Staunton insisted. In and of itself, it was sufficient to justify Britain in responding with force.34

  The Staunton who spoke before the House of Commons on that evening might seem difficult to reconcile with the man who had tried for so long to build a more respectful opinion of China and its civilization in Britain. That Staunton, the linguist and scholar, dreamed of embassies and defended China morally against the aggression of British free traders. The Staunton who stood up to defend the war, however, had always been a part of him as well: it was the part of him that believed the East India Company kept the corrupt local authorities of Canton in “check.” It was the dogmatist for protocol who had exerted so much effort to prevent Lord Amherst from performing the kowtow. Those two sides of George Staunton had always existed together, and they were not contradictory. Staunton’s faith in an equal relationship between Britain and China was founded on a high respect for both—a respect that in both cases he felt personally responsible to protect. Thus he was quick to react if a British free trader like Lindsay or Matheson should disparage China and call for unwarranted violence against it. But at the same time he was equally quick to react if it seemed the Chinese were treating the British as inferiors. Britain’s fundamental claim to an equal relationship with China was based, he believed, on refusing to humble itself. If Britain did not maintain what prestige it had in China—if, say, an ambassador should abase himself before the emperor, or if “atrocities” (as he saw them) against British subjects should be allowed to go unaddressed—that prestige would begin to crumble, and the relationship would fall apart.

  And it was about even more than that. As Staunton went on in his speech, he argued that the British prestige that was at stake involved far more than just Lin Zexu and China. For as he (and certain others) saw it, Britain held India primarily by the force of opinion. As long as elite Indians admired British power and British institutions, they would willingly accept British dominion. A show of weakness in China, Staunton warned, could therefore shake the foundations of British control in India as well. Lin Zexu’s actions at Canton were so unconscionable, he said—and, more to the point, so widely known abroad—that for the first time in all of its relations with China, Britain would have to take forceful action to restore its honor there. The implied humiliation of the kowtow had been simple enough to address through passive means, by simply refusing to perform it (or at least pretending publicly to have refused). But as he understood from Elliot’s reports, Lin had used force, and had threatened worse, and such active provocations could only be countered by an equally active response. Without a powerful reaction to restore the original balance, Staunton argued, the lasting damage to British prestige would affect not just trade with China but the whole of the British Empire in Asia.

  Perhaps to make up for his awkward advocacy of military action against a country whose sovereignty and dignity he had always defended, Staunton then went on at some length about how much he detested the opium trade and wished to see it brought to an end. He promised to second a motion being drafted by a lawmaker from Liverpool to ban the cultivation of poppies in British India. He insisted that the only way the drug trade could be successfully ended was if the Chinese and British were to cooperate on suppressing it—and to that end, he also suggested that the only way the two governments would cooperate on opium suppression was if they had a treaty, and given the failures of the Macartney and Amherst embassies, a treaty could probably only be gained as a result of war. Thus, by a somewhat bizarre course of reasoning, Staunton concluded that fighting a war in China might in fact be the only way to end the opium trade. The naval fleet on its way to Canton thus represented to him “the only prospect . . . of putting down a traffic, of which he was anxious to see the end.”

  In deciding to support the war, Staunton might have been entirely objective and selfless in his reasoning. He did not write down his inner thoughts at the time, so we cannot know. But behind his words one can sense an enormous measure of relief. Staunton had always been a political independent and social loner. After years of being the scorned objector, whether standing against the tide of public opinion on free trade or alienating himself from Palmerston by his objections to the China Courts Bill, he finally had a chance in his unexpected support for the war to throw off his unpopularity and be em
braced for once. Given how much he still craved Palmerston’s approval and friendship, the China debate was an opportunity to come to the charismatic foreign secretary’s aid and regain his good graces. Staunton had begun writing to Palmerston early on in the crisis, hoping to be asked for his advice. And Palmerston, to his gratification, had responded—a fact of which Staunton was so proud that in his memoir he reprinted every short, meaningless note the great politician sent him over the weeks leading up to the debate.35 Whatever the private forces that drove him, however, the basic fact of the matter was that in giving his full and enthusiastic support to the war, Staunton found himself for the very first time in his life firmly on the “popular” side, allied with Palmerston and the sitting government, a chamber full of rapt lawmakers hanging on his words. One hopes he didn’t enjoy it too much.