Empire Made

by Kief Hillsbery

  What Wellesley presented as founded upon duty and compelled by a sacred trust was recognized by the Court of Directors as a power grab. No governor general had ever had any say in appointments to the Company’s service. The Indian patronage was the jealously guarded possession of the directors themselves, who nominated candidates from within their circle of acquaintance without regard to ability and placed them in positions as they saw fit. It was bad enough that Wellesley sought to reduce the directors’ influence and authority by holding an effective veto over those they put forward for service. But in claiming for himself and his successors “the exclusive power of determining to what establishments of the service the students of the College should be finally appointed,” Wellesley proposed a seismic shift in the locus of employee loyalty—from London to Calcutta.

  By the time news of the college’s founding reached London, it had already enrolled its first class of students. But the directors, who now regarded Wellesley as an uncontrollable despot, refused to fund it. It was one thing to accept territorial expansion, after the fact—they could scarcely act otherwise as politicians warmed to the imperial idea. It was quite another to accede to the wanton appropriation of their own perquisites and power. Though they paid lip service to the “liberal and enlightened” character of Wellesley’s plan, they objected to its “considerable and unknown expense” and ordered the college’s abolition in January 1802.

  Wellesley backed down. But he took his time about it, and the College of Fort William continued to provide residential training for civil servants until 1805. By then his energies had returned to conquest. By then he commanded a private security force of British officers and locally recruited Indian soldiers that numbered 260,000 men—twice the size of the regular British army. By then the Mughal capital of Delhi had fallen, and Babur’s descendant Bahadur Shah II ruled an “empire” that consisted of his household. On the marches of the subcontinent, the Sikhs of the Punjab and the Gurkhas of Nepal remained ensconced in their mysterious kingdoms. Most of the rest of India—from Cape Comorin to the Sutlej River—was British.

  2

  * * *

  An Education

  THIRTY-FIVE YEARS LATER, in January 1840, Nigel Halleck enrolled in the college that the Company’s directors had decided they wanted after all. But they also wanted to keep an eye on it, so they located it on the site of a country house twenty miles north of London in Hertfordshire. The house was called Hailey Bury, and though the school was officially established as East India College, it became known as Haileybury soon after its buildings were completed and occupied in 1809.

  Nigel was eighteen, the second son of Charles Valentine Halleck, a barrister who was himself a second son, of a vicar. The Hallecks were a venerable clan, an offshoot of the Holyoakes who had settled in the Midlands prior to the Battle of Hastings. Recorded in Domesday Book as the Haliachs, they once held a manor in Leicestershire, but they had long since slipped from the provincial pantheon of landed gentry. Apart from modest but comfortable houses in Coventry, they owned no property, enjoyed no private income.

  The best they could hope for, in class-conscious England, was to maintain their status as gentlefolk. And the best way for Nigel to do that, coming of age in a country then enduring what Jan Morris called “the menopause between an agricultural and industrial society,” was to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. Once he had secured himself a position where he interacted professionally or socially with the nobility and the gentry, he was set for life, a gentleman among gentlemen, his muted destiny fulfilled.

  Instead, he wished to go to India. He harbored no creative ambitions of his own, but there was something of the artist about him, a craving for connection with a heightened world. He had left England for the first time the previous summer. His family lacked the resources to send him on the Grand Tour, the traditional trip to Europe, lasting months or even years, that served as a cultural and educational rite of passage for young Englishmen of privilege. But he visited Paris, Florence, Venice, and Rome. From Venice he wrote home wistfully of children at play, straddling the porphyry lions in the Piazzetta dei Leoncini, beside the Basilica of Saint Mark. They were the raggedest of urchins, on intimate terms with riches beyond price.

  Standing watching in his white kid gloves and white silk hat, Nigel felt impoverished by comparison. With benefit of hindsight, it is tempting to imagine him a tortured romantic, and to attribute the allure of the East to an inchoate longing for Byronic exile. The truth is more prosaic. He saw India in practical terms, as a colorful and congenial setting for the sort of mundane career to which he had long resigned himself. As a pupil at King Henry VIII School in Coventry, he realized early on that his lack of interest in the law was surpassed only by his lack of aptitude for it. His father, while disappointed, assured him that as long as he applied himself to his studies, he could count on a place at a theological seminary in Durham, recently established by churchmen with ties to the family. Once he graduated and served three or four years as a curate, his grandfather’s influence would be brought to bear in awarding him a “living” as a beneficed clergyman.

  He need not be condemned, in other words, to the shabby parsimony of a country vicar in a Trollope novel. He might well live in something close to luxury, tending without haste or undue exertion to the spiritual needs of the Surrey aristocracy. A delightful rose garden, a mahogany-paneled study, and a supply of good claret, judiciously replenished. To envisage such comforts came naturally to Nigel; the one thing he possessed in abundance was imagination. But it failed him utterly when he tried to picture himself in a cassock and dog collar. Would it be possible, he wondered, for the family to marshal its influence elsewhere? With friends of friends who were known to be cordially acquainted with one of the directors of the East India Company? Who might prevail upon that good gentleman to arrange his nomination for a place at Haileybury?

  His father, at first, thought not.

  Haileybury produced clerks. Haileybury produced managers. Haileybury produced civil servants. Haileybury produced what would come to be known and accorded respect as “white-collar workers,” but in 1839 there was no such term and no such respect, not, at any rate, from the likes of Charles Valentine Halleck. Those positions were wholly unsuitable for gentlemen; ergo, gentlemen did not fill them. It was true that the earnings of men who did fill them qualified them for inclusion in the nascent middle class. It was also true that their income could exceed that of their genteel betters in the professional classes. That didn’t matter, though. Gentlemen might make money, but money made no gentlemen.

  “You were either a gentleman or not a gentleman, and if you were a gentleman you struggled to behave as such, whatever your income might be,” wrote George Orwell, who took up a posting in the Indian Civil Service eighty years after Nigel and whose background in what he called “the lower-upper-middle class” was identical. Both were grandsons of clergymen; both came from families of diminished prosperity who clung to gentility as their birthright:

  “Probably the distinguishing mark of the upper middle class was that its traditions were not to any extent commercial, but mainly military, official, and professional. People in this class owned no land, but they felt that they were landowners in the sight of God and kept up a semi-aristocratic outlook by going into the professions and the fighting services rather than into trade. Small boys used to count the plum stones on their plates and foretell their destiny by chanting ‘Army, Navy, Church, Medicine, Law.’”

  Few things were more abhorrent to Nigel’s father than the prospect of his sons “going into trade.” Over time, the Hallecks had lost their property, but they clung to their scruples about blotting the family copybook by profiting from commerce. They were forever bondholders, never stockholders. And now Nigel proposed to cast his lot with a company of traders?

  Fortunately for Nigel, recent history provided a counterargument. On paper, the Company remained exactly what Charles Halleck said it was. But even as
it accumulated ever more power and authority in India, its commercial standing was eroded at home by the increasing enthusiasm in Parliament for free trade. It had lost its monopoly on trade with India in 1813, due largely to lobbying by English manufacturers and provincial merchants but also with support from liberals, who argued that unrestricted trade would make essential products available to everyone and lead to a more equitable society. And the latest renewal of its charter by act of Parliament had forbidden it to trade at all.

  The act, which granted the Company the administration of India for another twenty years, was defended in the House of Lords by Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington. Without drawing attention to his own role in India’s subjugation—he unblushingly blamed the Company’s current deficit of £40 million on “all the wars in which that Empire has been engaged”—he dismissed opposition claims that an enterprise unsuited for trade could hardly be suited for governance. On the contrary, said the duke, the Company had proved a resounding success. It was responsible for the “proud situation” in which British India now stood, ready to assume the mantle of a higher calling.

  Charles Halleck may have been a snob, but he was a high-minded snob, and the new rationale for imperial rule would have appealed to him. He was also a committed Christian, who would have approved of Haileybury’s faculty—most were clergymen as well as academics. Taking their cue from Richard Wellesley’s ill-fated College of Fort William, they saw to it that the curriculum placed as much emphasis on the teaching of religion and morality as on Eastern languages, literature, and history.

  It was finally enough for Nigel’s father. He would never have assisted his son in finding a niche for himself in the commercial class, but a role in the ruling class was something else again. It was a new sort of ruling class, to be sure, in a faraway place, and, like most British gentlemen of his age and station, he was deeply suspicious of anything new and everything foreign. In the end, he overcame his misgivings by weighing his duty in the balance of his conscience.

  As a father, he yearned to say no.

  As an Englishman and Christian, he felt bound to say yes.

  Halleck duly secured the intercession of a local squire on his son’s behalf, and, at the beginning of November 1839, Nigel received a letter from India House, the Company’s headquarters on Leadenhall Street in the City of London. It informed him, without elaboration, that he had been nominated for an “Indian Writership” by one of the Company’s directors.

  Until recently, that would have sufficed to guarantee his admission to Haileybury. But the same legislation that ended the Company’s commercial activities had also introduced the principle of competition into its hiring practices. Henceforth, nominees needed to pass a preliminary examination before admittance to the college.

  Those who took the exam recalled it as an ordeal. It was administered in a large room at India House, typically to about forty young men, and lasted three days. Its components included Greek, Latin, English history, mathematics, and geography. But no one could complain that they were caught off-guard by the questions. The directors, noted one Company official, “were naturally interested in making the passage through Haileybury as easy as possible for their nominees.” Details of the examination, “in all its particulars,” were provided to candidates in advance by the college secretary. He was the same gentleman who stood before the assembled nominees a month or so after its administration and read out the names of those who had passed.

  Most belonged to eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds like Nigel, second sons of families who could promise a patrimony only to their firstborn. A disproportionate share were recognizably Scottish; a tradition of looking to India for a career among the surplus sons of the mercantile and professional classes there had taken hold with the Acts of Union, and by 1771 almost half the Company’s clerks were Scotsmen. Ulstermen were overrepresented, too. But the plurality of names intoned by the secretary were English, and in December 1839, Nigel’s was one of them. With his intellectual and moral fitness proven (and no medical examination required, either before or after the College course, despite the hazards of the Indian climate), he was good to go.

  At least as far as Hertfordshire.

  Where he quickly learned that talking about India was considered poor form.

  Haileybury proved as anomalous as the Indian Empire itself. Even the stately Grecian facade the college presented to the world was not what it seemed. No one ever drove up to it, and no one ever entered by it. An alumnus later recalled this “architectural fraud” as “a mere show-front—a sort of clever artistic sham,” seemingly erected “with the sole aim and object of atoning for utter hideousness hidden away in its rear.” The rest of the academic quadrangle consisted of charmless bare-brick buildings, pierced with small windows and roofed with cheap slates, “of a pattern which would scarcely have been tolerable in a barrack, a prison, or a workhouse.” Its opposite sides housed two hundred students’ rooms, all equally small, entered by doors opening out of narrow dark corridors. Each contained a recess for a bed and a curtain to draw across it, with a cupboard on one side. Light entered through a single window, guarded by iron bars that reinforced the impression of a prisoner’s cell.

  It was true that the qualifications of the faculty were above reproach. Most were recruited from Oxford and Cambridge, and very few were ever lured back; professor of modern history and economics Thomas Robert Malthus, who wrote his famous work on population at Haileybury, remained a professor until his death, thirty years after his appointment. It was also true that students were not allowed to proceed to India unless they passed examinations each term for four terms, in nine subjects, including Sanskrit, Persian, and Hindustani. And, finally, it was true that the Company directors were seldom disappointed when they came down in a body from Leadenhall Street twice each year to distribute prizes and learn of the success or failure of their nominees. With impressive ceremony, the Company chairman addressed fulsome congratulations on the state of the college to the assembled students and faculty, offering, in the words of one observer, “as rose-coloured a view as possible of its moral and intellectual condition.”

  The larger truth, however, was that Haileybury was notorious throughout England as a den of iniquity. “Drunkenness, lack of discipline, and wild local wenching” were cited by one historian as the “main charges” against the student body. George Canning, a Company director who was obliged to go down to the college to quell a riot, reported afterwards that, though he had faced bitter opposition in the House of Commons and encountered turbulent riots at Liverpool, “I was never floored and daunted till now, and that by a lot of Haileybury boys.”

  The daily routine began innocently enough, with a morning service in the chapel at eight o’clock. Except on Sunday, it lasted barely twenty minutes, and always included a special prayer for the college and the reading of a chapter from the Bible. The breakfast that followed was meant to be a humble repast of bread and butter with tea or coffee, served back in students’ rooms by women—typically widows or spinsters—attached to each corridor as “bedmakers.” In practice, it amounted to the onset of the day’s revelry. Cleared of its bed recess and furnished with extra chairs or couches, a room became a “club” for eight to ten men, who pooled their resources to dine on meat and fish and pastries, washed down with beer or claret (thus flouting college regulations that prohibited consumption of alcohol except in “special cases”).

  When they’d had their fill, they sauntered down to the quadrangle to lounge about, smoking pipes, while tradesmen from Hertford touted their wares. Local medical men, holding themselves apart from the swarm of tailors, hairdressers, stationers, and booksellers, conducted a brisk business issuing “aegrotats” to students seeking exemption from chapel and lectures on grounds of ill health from ailments real (occasionally) and imaginary (mostly).

  To acquire the only other acceptable excuses for absence, they were obliged to apply to the principal or dean for “exeats,” which were granted for seriou
s illness, deaths of near relations, and other urgent reasons. These passes empowered the holders to absent themselves from campus for two or three days or longer, and, like aegrotats, they were commonly obtained under false pretenses. Monier Williams, a classmate of Nigel’s who went on to join the faculty as an instructor in Eastern languages after his health failed him in India, later described the genesis of what came to be known as “corn exeats”:

  “It was said of a dissipated and plausible youth in my time that having killed all his relations, he had to rack his brains for other expedients, till he happily hit upon the artifice of pretending that, as there was no Chiropodist in the neighbourhood, it was necessary to go to London to have certain painful excrescences removed from his feet, and so facilitate his walking with due punctuality to chapel and lectures.”

  Alas, this “master-stroke of invention” was taken up by others and tried once too often. The principal, after remarking that the current class was more painfully afflicted with corns than any other in his experience, enjoined the dean from granting further exeats on that plea.

  When classes commenced, at 10:00 a.m., those lacking official excuses presented themselves for three hours of instruction in classics and mathematics (Mondays and Tuesdays), law, political economy, and history (Wednesdays and Thursdays), and Oriental languages (Fridays and Saturdays). Upon their dismissal, at 1:00 p.m., as recalled by another Old Haileyburian in recounting the riotous order of a typical day, they crowded into a large cellar storeroom for bread and cheese and beer, served by two “very pretty” girls. The ensuing horseplay and “coarse jesting” lasted until dinnertime, at six, followed by chapel, at eight, then “an indescribable hub-bub and uproar of oaths, songs, indecent jokes and horseplay as before,” after everyone returned to the cellar. Though the “steady men” eventually retired to their rooms to hit the books, the “noisy ones” kept the party going, drinking and smoking, screaming and fighting and singing ribald songs until three or four in the morning, when “the inebriates would somehow be got to their rooms and silence would at last descend upon the Quad.”