And that was all there was to it. No matter how Staunton tried to salvage his moral principles by separating the issue of opium from the issue of war, denouncing the opium trade even as he defended the naval expedition, his contribution to the debate—and it was a major one—was to console any lawmakers with misgivings about the morality of Palmerston’s war that it was perfectly just. Great Britain’s most respected voice of authority on China, with none to rival him, gave the undecided Whigs in the House of Commons his blessing to vote their party line with a clean conscience. As the Spectator commented dryly afterward, “Sir George Staunton threw the weight of his experience into the Ministerial scale, and must have been almost overwhelmed with the expressions of gratitude for his help.”36
The motion finally came to a vote at four o’clock in the morning of April 10 after three grueling nights of debate. Five hundred and thirty-three weary parliamentarians filed out into the division lobbies, and when their votes were tallied, it turned out that Palmerston had prevailed by the slimmest of margins. A majority of just nine votes—271 to 262—allowed Melbourne’s government to escape censure and effectively gave Palmerston’s war in China a sanction to proceed as planned. The outcome was so close that if the very cabinet ministers whose conduct was on trial had not been permitted to vote in their own favor, the motion to condemn them would have passed. For that reason it had been said that if the majority were fewer than ten votes, Palmerston and the other ministers would still agree to resign.37 It was, but they did not.
It is impossible to measure exactly how much influence George Staunton had on that outcome, but at least seven or eight of the Whig lawmakers had openly expressed their willingness to defy their party and oppose the China war if the debate should convince them it was morally unjust.38 If Staunton had declined to support Palmerston, or even had spoken against him, it would have taken just five of those waverers to change their votes and the entire outcome would have been reversed. James Graham’s resolution of censure would have passed, Melbourne’s government would have been brought down, and the Opium War might have been prevented.
An angry opposition press hunted for parties to blame. Some faulted Graham for couching his resolution in such political language of “negligence” rather than targeting the war head-on: if the Conservatives had “proposed to stop the war at all events, and to prevent every infraction of the laws of China with respect to opium—so surely would Parliament have gone along with them, in censuring the conduct of the Ministers,” said the Spectator.39 Another paper observed that though the ministry survived the vote of censure (barely), nevertheless “they are condemned by two hundred and sixty-two of the people’s representatives, and by the nation at large the principle of the war is all but universally condemned.”40 A majority of just nine votes out of more than five hundred “would have been fatal to the existence of any preceding Administration,” said one critic, “and it argues a contempt of the opinion of Parliament, and a degree of assurance never equalled, to persevere in plunging the country into war on the strength of such a vote.”41
Any lingering hopes that the closeness of the vote in the House of Commons might still derail the war were destroyed a month later with the failure in the House of Lords of a much more explicit motion to blame the crisis on British opium traders.42 Palmerston’s Conservative antagonists had a clear majority in the upper house, and the motion was expected to pass until the elderly Duke of Wellington—the general who had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, Britain’s greatest living military hero, a former prime minister, and a Conservative—broke with his party to deliver an adamantly pro-Palmerston speech that silenced the motion’s supporters and sent it to a quick death.
Wellington said he had looked into the cause of the war and was positive that “it could not be opium.” The lanky, seventy-one-year-old “Iron Duke” argued that it was entirely about the protection of British lives in the far corners of the world, an unquestionably fair use of military power. The dispatch of a naval fleet was the only fitting and just response, he believed, to the rash and violent actions of Lin Zexu against Elliot and the British merchants. Wellington’s one brush with China in the past had been a brief appointment as foreign secretary—just a few months in 1834, during an interim when Palmerston’s party was thrown out of government and then quickly returned. But in that brief period it had been Wellington who received Lord Napier’s first dispatches calling for war in China. He, in fact, was the foreign secretary who had told Napier with such snideness, “It is not by force and violence that His Majesty intends to establish a commercial intercourse between his subjects and China.”
So Wellington had no natural inclination toward an aggressive policy in China—if he’d wanted one, Napier had given him a fine opening in 1834. Rather, as with Palmerston himself, and Staunton, and others who had in the past repudiated calls for violence against China but now supported the war at hand, Wellington found himself persuaded by Elliot’s exaggerated reports of the “siege” at Canton and the reputed threats to execute British merchants. He was convinced that the entire nature of the situation had changed—that now, for the first time, the Chinese were vicious provocateurs, the traders were comparably innocent, and Britain had suffered “insult and . . . injuries such as he believed had never been before inflicted on this country.”43 The breakdown of relations at Canton, by this view, was not something that had been building up over time. Rather, it was so shocking and demanded such a strong response precisely because it had no precedent. After two centuries of peaceful trade, China, as he—through Elliot—saw it, had suddenly turned rabid, and if Britain wished to redeem its honor and protect its trade in the future, it had no choice but to use the navy to teach the Chinese a lesson in respect.
This, then, was the rationale for a war in China from those who would never have sanctioned such a thing even a few months earlier. War, to these recalcitrant supporters, was regrettable, and it certainly had been provoked by the irresponsible actions of British subjects, and it should have been avoided—but all that was meaningless now because the Chinese had committed themselves and so Britain must respond. Nevertheless, it should be gotten over with as quickly as possible so that peace and friendship could be restored to the two countries. Trapped by a fear of lost imperial honor, these were hardly hawks or warmongers. Few of the war’s reluctant enablers in Parliament, and none of its opponents, pretended that it would result in anything resembling honor or glory for the British who fought it. They would turn out to be correct.
On the same day that Lord Wellington laid waste to the motion against the Opium War in the House of Lords, a quiet news item appeared in several local newspapers announcing the death, at age sixty-seven, of Thomas Manning. A relic of an earlier age, Manning had managed to outlive both Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to say nothing of his colleague Robert Morrison. In contrast to George Staunton’s entrance into Parliament and regular involvement in various London scholarly societies, however, the once outgoing and flamboyant Manning had reversed course in his later years and lived in obscurity. After his return from China, said one obituary, “eagerly was his company sought by the noblest and most distinguished in the land,” but he came to prefer solitude, and for the last few years of his life he lived alone in a small rental cottage near Dartford, England. He kept the cottage deliberately bare, with no carpets or decorations. There was no furniture save for a few chairs and his collection of Chinese books, which was reputed by some to be “the finest Chinese library in Europe.”
His adventures long behind him, in his older age Manning became more and more the hermetic scholar, buried deep in his books, pottering about in his spare cottage. He had nothing to say about the run-up to war—indeed, he said nothing publicly about China at all and did not involve himself in politics. He still received visitors now and then, and did some proofreading work (for Parliament, in fact, though most recently he had worked on the papers relating to the Poor Laws, not the China war). He also gave occasional t
ranslation help to others but went to his grave without ever having published an account of his journey to Tibet. Nevertheless he was remembered, per another obituary, as “the first Chinese Scholar in Europe.”44 As if in memory of grander times, he had grown back his beard toward the end. It was no longer black as when he was a young man, but pure and white as snow, reaching down to his waist as it did when he lived in China. In a final act of the cryptic restlessness that had marked his life, shortly before his death he removed it for the last time, not with a razor but by plucking it out with his fingers, hair by hair.45
In 1811 Manning had spent long afternoons with his friend the half-Manchu General, listening to his stories of the old days and drinking wine as the soldiers sang to them and the General played his lute. He sat in audience with the Dalai Lama and saw in the boy such grace and beauty that he “could have wept through strangeness of sensation.” It is perhaps only a cruel coincidence that in 1840 Manning’s death should have come just as in the halls of Parliament, and on the larger scale of the British nation, the hope for a peaceful future with the Qing Empire was dying as well.
Once the war had the blessing of both houses of Parliament, lukewarm as that blessing may have been, it took on a logic of its own, building a momentum that rolled over its silenced opponents, eventually overwhelming even Charles Elliot, the man who had started it all. In none of the debates in Parliament was it ever discussed what the concrete goals of the war were to be. That was up to the cabinet, in particular Palmerston. The supporters of war talked of something brief and restrained, a polite rebuke that would return the status quo to Canton with Britain’s honor intact. They called for the protection of British subjects from arbitrary attack or punishment by Chinese authorities, for redress and apologies, but those were vague and limited goals. They did not speak of what the free traders like Jardine and Matheson and Lindsay had been hoping to get from a war in China—a war for which these traders had been lobbying for years without success and were now finally being given.
The truth was that the traders at Canton didn’t really much care about the events in 1839 that so preoccupied the lawmakers. They had seen through the bluster of Lin Zexu and knew that Elliot overreacted to dangers that probably didn’t exist. As far as the showdown between Lin and Elliot went, all they really cared about was getting paid for their opium by the British government. Separately, however, for a very long time there had been those among them who held grander goals for the employment of British force in China—they wanted ports opened, they wanted free access to the coast, they wanted treaties that protected and encouraged the expansion of their trade. They wanted an end to the restrictions of the old Canton system that had been in place since the 1760s. They wanted what not one single person in Parliament had called for: the opening of China.
Palmerston heard them. William Jardine got the foreign secretary’s ear through his letter of introduction from Charles Elliot, aided by the mediation of John Abel Smith. He first met with Palmerston four days before the fateful cabinet meeting of October 1 (and gave him several charts of the China coast that were likely the same ones Palmerston used to make his case for a war at the meeting). Jardine also later wrote memoranda on Chinese affairs for the Foreign Office in which he practically sketched out a plan for the war on Palmerston’s behalf, making specific recommendations on useful harbors, on the distribution of force, even volunteering his own smuggling fleet (and his own men!) for a deputized military role, telling Palmerston that “many of the small opium vessels might be equipped, and placed under the Command of lieutenants of Her Majesty’s Navy—their masters, officers and crew (who are generally well acquainted with the coast and islands) acting under them.”46 Palmerston’s secret instructions to the Admiralty that first launched the fleet to China that November not only approximated Jardine’s recommendations for the number and size of vessels to be sent but also relayed Jardine’s offer of assistance, noting that the fleet’s admiral would find in China “a considerable number of private trading ships, built for fast sailing, well equipped and armed” that he might wish to hire.47
William Jardine was even so bold as to suggest what the British should ask for in negotiations with the Chinese government. Payment for the opium and a treaty to prevent such collisions in the future, yes, but also “if possible, to open the ports of the Empire to foreign commerce, or as many of them as can be obtained.”48 It was what Western merchants had dreamed of in vain for eighty years, all the way back to James Flint’s ill-fated voyage up the coast in 1759. Jardine specified five advantageous ports “which would bring us in more immediate contact with the districts where our woollens are consumed, and the Teas and Silk produced.”
However, Jardine did not—significantly—ask that China be made to legalize opium. In fact, he suggested that the British negotiator should tell the Chinese “it is not the usage of civilized nations to interfere with the fiscal regulations of each other,” meaning that they were free to make and enforce their own laws. Jardine also said the negotiator should tell the Chinese “to bear in mind, we have never protected the opium vessels in acts of smuggling, nor complained of any aggression of the Chinese Government against them” (which was sort of true, in an exceedingly limited, technical sense). If it might appear counterintuitive for William Jardine to ask that British naval power not be used to force China to accept the opium trade, it is worth noting that he and Matheson had invested a great deal of money and effort in building a highly specialized fleet, and cultivating a network of Chinese contacts, specifically to dominate opium as a smuggling trade on the China coast. If it were legalized, they would lose their competitive advantage. The last thing they needed from the “Opium War” was for China to normalize the drug trade.
The ships of the British fleet began arriving off Hong Kong in early June 1840 and were fully assembled by the end of the month: sixteen men-of-war (the three largest of them carrying seventy-four guns each, more formidable than either the Lion or the Alceste), four steamers, and four thousand British and Indian troops on twenty-seven transport vessels. The admiral of the fleet, fittingly enough, was yet another of Charles Elliot’s many cousins, this one named George Elliot. Palmerston made the two Elliots joint plenipotentiaries, empowering them to negotiate with the Chinese government when the time came. Even after all that had happened, even after Charles Elliot stuck the British government with a bill for £2 million worth of opium, Palmerston still trusted him. The merchants, however, were outraged when they learned he would be leading the war, one of them writing to the Canton Register in amazement that the Whigs would keep Elliot on after his “fearful catalogue of blunders” in China. “Where,” that writer asked, “can be found such a display of incompetency as the superintendent’s acts afford?”49
With a detachment of the fleet setting a blockade of Canton, the rest of the force sailed north to the island of Chusan, where they captured the main city, Dinghai, with hardly any effort at all. The battle for that city in early July lasted effectively for less than ten minutes before the Chinese guns went silent.50 One of the best of those guns, they later found, bore an inscription showing it to have been cast in the year 1601.51 The British occupied the city and set up a hasty military government for the island of Chusan in which Karl Gutzlaff—leaving behind the very last vestiges of his missionary humility—took charge as chief magistrate of the occupation government. After sending a few warships to blockade the Yangzi River and several ports along the coast, the remainder of the British fleet continued north with the two Elliots all the way to the mouth of the White River, the muddy, serpentine waterway where Macartney and Amherst had left behind the Lion and the Alceste on their respective embassies before proceeding inland on Chinese junks toward Tianjin.
The British fleet anchored a few miles off the White River on August 10, 1840, and the next morning an officer sailed in with a small convoy to deliver a letter from Palmerston, translated into Chinese, announcing the grounds of war. A Chinese official forwarded the let
ter to the governor-general, Qishan—the same man who had warned Lin Zexu against starting a war with the British back before Lin went to Canton. In an echo of the events eight decades earlier on the same spot when James Flint presented his translated petition from the British supercargoes to Qianlong, Qishan forwarded Palmerston’s letter to the Daoguang emperor in Beijing. This time, however, the balance of strength was reversed; the British this time were not petitioners.
As Daoguang understood Palmerston’s letter, it seemed that Britain’s grievances were directed mainly at Lin Zexu, and so he concluded that the war was Lin’s fault. In a furious edict on August 21 he blamed Lin for provoking the British and accused him of failing both in his efforts to shut down the external opium trade and to suppress its use within the country. “You are just making excuses with empty words,” Daoguang wrote to his formerly favorite minister. “Nothing has been accomplished but many troubles have been created. Thinking of these things, I cannot contain my rage. What do you have to say now?”52 In anger, Daoguang stripped Lin of his powers as imperial commissioner. He punished Deng Tingzhen as well, blaming both men for causing the war with Britain. Both would be sentenced to exile in the far western reaches of the empire.
Daoguang had never asked for, nor had he sanctioned, a war with the British. And given the much larger and more pernicious problems he faced internally in the empire, he wanted to end the external conflict as swiftly as possible. Since the root cause seemed to be Lin Zexu’s actions toward the British traders, rather than anything directly involving the throne, he appointed Qishan to investigate Lin’s conduct at Canton and restore peace. Qishan had long viewed Lin as a rival and was quite pleased with the appointment. He would, over time, provide Daoguang with vicious criticisms of Lin’s mishandling of the foreigners at Canton, one of which centered on Lin’s offer to compensate the foreigners with a few pounds of tea for each chest of opium. Lin had gotten the foreigners’ hopes up so high with his hints about “rewarding” them for their surrendered opium, said Qishan, that such a measly offer of compensation was bound to provoke them into violence.53
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