by Jan Morris
England had been an overseas Power for nearly 900 years—never since the Norman conquest had the Crown been without possessions across the water. But the idea of empire was suspect in the Britain of the 1830s. It went with foreign despotisms and aggressors, and had long lost the stately pacific meaning that Spenser and Milton had given the word, when they wrote of the Britannick Empire long before. Westminster was called the Imperial Parliament only because it had, since 1800, incorporated the parliament of Ireland, while the State Crown was Imperial only in ancient defiance of the Holy Roman Empire. The eighteenth century British Empire, before the loss of the American colonies, had been a self-contained economic system, protected by tariffs, producing its own raw materials, providing its own markets, shipping its own products in its own vessels. The Corn Laws kept foreign competition to a minimum: the Navigation Acts ensured a British monopoly of trade throughout the empire. Now the economic arguments for such a system seemed to be discredited. The progressive theory now was Free Trade, which would allow the goods of all nations to flow without tariffs and restrictions all over the globe, and seemed to make the possession of colonies obsolete. With Great Britain mistress both of the means of production and the means of distribution, was not the whole world her market-place? Why bother with the expense and worry of colonies? Free Trade was not yet accepted British policy, but already powerful lobbies were pressing for the repeal of the Corn Laws and the Navigation Acts, and deriding the idea of empire. Colonies, said Richard Cobden, ‘serve but as gorgeous and ponderous appendages to swell our ostensible grandeur without improving our balance of trade’, and if laissez-faire was the watchword of the nation’s new economic instincts, a suggested slogan for colonial policy was laissez-aller.
Memories of the American Revolution, too, helped to sour the notion of empire. A great deal had happened to the world since then, but there were still many Britons alive who had fought against the rebels of the thirteen colonies, or their sons in the war of 1812. The American Revolution had seemed to show that the more successful an overseas settlement, the more certain it was to break away from the Mother Country, and probably set up in rivalry against her. Besides, it had convinced many people that colonialism necessarily led in the end to repression—if not of one’s own fellow-countrymen, only striving to be free, then of foreigners in whose affairs the British had no right to meddle. Power corrupted. The British remembered still the trial of Warren Hastings in 1785: though it had ended in acquittal it had served its purpose—to warn the nation against the danger of ambitious satraps, made rich by the spoils of empire and seditious by the temptations of distant authority.
All in all the British were not thinking in imperial terms. They were rich. They were victorious. They were admired. They were not yet short of markets for their industries. They were strategically invulnerable, and they were preoccupied with domestic issues. When the queen was crowned, shortly before her nineteenth birthday, we may be sure she thought little of any possessions beyond the seas. She was the island queen, anointed with the pageantry and ritual evolved by the island people during a thousand years of history—hailed by her island peers, consecrated by her island bishops, cheered through the streets of London by a population which was almost undilutedly English. ‘I really cannot say bow proud I feel to be the Queen of such a Nation’, she wrote in her journal, and she was unquestionably thinking of the nation of the English, 14 million strong in their 50,000 green square miles. Even the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish were unfamiliar to her then, when the world called her kingdom simply ‘England’, and only seers could foretell how colossally her responsibilities were to multiply, how wildly the image of her nation would grow, and how different would be the meaning of her royalty before her reign was done. (‘Poor little Queen’, Carlyle wrote, ‘She is at an age at which a girl can hardly be trusted to choose a bonnet for herself; yet a task is laid upon her from which an archangel might shrink.’)
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Far away Lord Auckland laboured: for even now there did exist a British Empire of sorts, an inchoate collection of territories acquired in bits and pieces over the generations, administered partly by the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, partly by great chartered companies. It was an unsystematic affair, an empire in abeyance, possessing no unity of purpose or sense of whole, and it was characteristic that the only complete register of its affairs was compiled by an enthusiastic amateur, Robert Montgomery Martin, who had travelled in the British possessions and returned to England a dedicated advocate of the colonial system. Martin estimated, soon after the Queen’s accession, that the area of the overseas empire was some 2 million square miles, with a population of rather more than 100 million. Some of its possessions were relics of the old eighteenth century empire, some were new settlements of Britons overseas, some were the spoils of recent victory, touched with splendour—as it said above the guardroom door in St George’s Square, Valletta, on the newly acquired island of Malta:
Magnae et invictae Britanniae
Melitensium amor et Europae vox
Has insulas canfirmat A.D. 18141
The grandest of the imperial possessions were in India: there sovereignty had been acquired in stages by the East India Company until by 1837 most of the sub-continent was under British suzerainty, and 50,000 Britons, led by George Auckland, lorded it over more than 90 million Indians. Then there were the West Indian islands, with British Honduras and British Guiana on the American mainland—the sugar colonies, which had for a century and more made a disproportionate contribution to the prosperity of England, but were now rotting in decline. There were the colonies in Canada—Newfoundland, the oldest of them all, Nova Scotia settled largely by loyalists from the United States, French settlements in conquered Quebec, English and Scots in Ontario, and the scattered outposts of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the unimaginable wastelands of the west. There were four settlements in Australia, two of them originally penal colonies, and there was Ireland close to home, ruled by the English for seven centuries, and still so primitive that in 1837 the 9,000 people of Tullahobagly, County Donegal, possessed between them ten beds and 93 chairs.
The Cape of Good Hope was British, and so was Singapore, founded by Stamford Raffles twenty years before. There were trading settlements at Penang and Arakan, and Ceylon had been acquired at the Peace of 1815. In Europe the flag flew over Gibraltar, Heligoland, the Ionian Islands in the Adriatic, and Malta—Nelson’s ‘outer-work to India’. Elsewhere a miscellaneous scatter of islands, strong-points and trading stations infinitesimally enhanced the grandeur of Mr Martin’s statistics—the Falklands and the Seychelles, Mauritius and Gambia, the trading forts of the Gold Coast, Norfolk Island in the South Pacific, St Helena where Napoleon died, Guiana and Fernando Po and Bermuda, defined by one visionary strategist of the day as ‘central to the mouths of the Amazon, the Mississippi, the Oronooko, the St Lawrence, and to the innumerable tributary rivers which send their waters through these mighty vomitaries to the ocean’. In all, it was estimated, some 1,200,000 Britons were living overseas, including 56,000 soldiers in the imperial garrisons.
The imperial experience had inevitably left its mark upon the British. The East India nabobs, for example, formed a distinctive sub-society of their own among the British monied classes: often immensely rich, yellowed by their years in Madras or Calcutta, eccentric of habit and authoritarian of style, they filled their houses with ornate mementoes of the east, and lived in a manner assertively different from the ways of their neighbours—more flamboyant, more aloof, and generally less responsible, for though many of them acquired substantial estates upon their retirement from the east, their roots were seldom deep in the countryside. The Caribbean planters, too, many of whom had come home when the abolition of slavery spoiled things in the sugar islands, formed a cohesive group, and the West India Interest provided one of parliament’s most persistent lobbies. Many a respected family, from the Barretts of Wimpole Street to the Lascelles of Harewood, owed its dignity to West
Indian enterprise; mansions like Stowe and Fonthill were built with sugar money; in the spa societies of Bath, Cheltenham or Tunbridge Wells the planters were instantly recognizable, taking the waters with bronzed cronies from Barbados or Jamaica, and eventually filling a sizeable proportion of wall-space in abbey or parish church.
In London, though the offices of empire hardly showed, the monuments of imperial trade were evident enough. Beyond the Tower the East India and West India docks were thronged with masts and riggings; in the warehouses of the Hudson’s Bay Company the beaver pelts and fox skins were piled in their lucrative thousands; in the heart of the City, at the corner of Lime and Leadenhall Streets, stood the headquarters of the East India Company, surmounted by a gigantic Britannia, containing a magnificent library and an Oriental Repository of Indian treasures.1 In Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow entire communities had been enriched specifically by the imperial enterprise. These were the home ports of the triangular trade which had, for generations, swopped English manufactured goods for African slaves for American raw materials, making a profit on each transaction. Here the slavers had found their crews, shanghaiing drunkards in the waterside inns of Hotwells or Merseyside, or blackmailing criminals into service. The slaving captains and merchants were still great men there, and the profits of slavery had passed into the civic arteries long before, and nourished other lucrative ventures in their turn.
Here and there throughout the kingdom, too, lesser memorials bore witness to the fact of empire: captured guns from India or Quebec, commemorative plaques to the casualties of tropic wars, personal trophies like the great gates which, high and generally invisible on the mist-shrouded moors of Knock Fyrish in Easter Ross, Sir Hector Munro of Foulis had erected to commemorate the part he played, and the fortune he consolidated, at the capture of Negapatam in 1781. Gatepost pineapples, Hindu cannons in the Tower of London, gilded domes upon a country house, an exotic grave in a country churchyard, an unpronounceable battle honour upon a regimental standard: such small encrustations upon the island fabric were symptoms of the imperial instinct that lay fallow there, momentarily subdued—‘the sentiment of Empire’, the young Gladstone called it, ‘which may be called innate in every Briton’.
And already there were a few citizens who, looking ahead into the Victorian era, thought that the national destiny lay in a more deliberate overseas expansion. There were evangelists who believed in empire as the instrument of Christian duty, and social theorists who believed in emigration as the instrument of enlightened progress, and merchants unconvinced of the advantages of Free Trade, and activists of the West India Interest and the India lobby, and soldiers bored after a decade of peace, and adventurers coveting fresh opportunities of self-advantage. There were fighting patriots, and speculators of exotic preference, and there were even ornamental visionaries, half a century before their time, who conceived a new British Empire framed in symbolism, and endowed with a grand and mystic meaning.
One of these was Robert Martin, who standing back from his immense collection of imperial facts, and contemplating his engravings of colonial seals and charters, concluded that the British Empire of 1837, ramshackle and disregarded though it seemed, would prove to be one of the great accomplishments of history, ‘on whose extension and improvement, so far as human judgement can predict, depends the happiness of the world’.1 Another was J. M. Gandy, an able but erratic architect of grandiloquent style. Gandy was already a High Victorian, at the very opening of the Victorian age, and even before the Queen’s accession he exhibited at the Royal Academy a design for an Imperial Palace, to be the home and headquarters of the Sovereigns of the British Empire. It was to be a building of overpowering elaboration, domed, pedimented, turreted, colonnaded, upheld by numberless caryatids, ornamented with urns and friezes and mosaic pavements and sunken gardens and ceremonial staircases, and allegorically completed by the marble columns, toppled ignominiously in the forecourt, of earlier and more transient sovereignties.
Fifty years later the Queen might have loved it, for it was only a prophetic expression of national emotions to come: but in 1837 it struck a false note, the Imperial Palace was still-born, and Gandy himself, whose most remarkable monument after all was to be Doric House on Sion Hill in Bath, died unhonoured and unremembered, some say insane.1
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No, in 1837 England seemed to need no empire, and the British people as a whole were not much interested in their colonies. How could one be expected to show an interest in a country like Canada, demanded Lord Melbourne the Prime Minister, where a salmon would not rise to a fly? The Secretary of State for War looked after colonial matters in his less busy moments, and in a back room at the Colonial office in Westminster one might find in effect the embodiment of Britain’s imperial authority, shrivelled into the duties of some obscure official—‘we know not the name’, as the social reformer Charles Buller put it, ‘the history or the functions of the individual, into the narrow limits of whose person we find the Mother Country shrunk….’ It was as though the kingdom had put the imperial idea deliberately out of mind. As the victorious British proceeded with their experiments of political reform, as the thrilling new railways crept across the island—‘the velocity is delightful’, reported Charles Greville the diarist, dubiously taking the Liverpool train that year—as the statesmen of England concerned themselves with the settlement of Europe, and the dumpy young Queen timorously submitted to the burdens of her office—‘very few have more real good will and more real desire to do what is fit and right than I have’—as Dickens got on with Oliver Twist and Landseer started Dignity and Impudence and Darwin worked up his notes on the voyage of the Beagle—as Cobden stormed on about the Corn Laws, and Charles Barry perfected his designs for the new Houses of Parliament, and the coal-grimed girls dragged their wagons through the stifling mine-shafts, and Gladstone settled down to his treatise on Church and State—as this most fascinating of island states entered upon the thirty-sixth reign of its ancient monarchy, the possession of an overseas empire seemed irrelevant to its wealth, dignity and interest. ‘For the fact is, Jardine’, wrote a China merchant in London to his colleague in Canton, ‘the 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 cannot really be brought to think of us outlanders….’
Miss Eden appeared to put it in perspective. Presently Lord Auckland went into the Punjab to meet the great King of the Sikhs, Ranjit Singh, whose help he required in a war he was about to start. Ranjit, the Lion of the Punjab, was one of the most powerful men in India, and a great ruler of men—half-blind, exceedingly astute, drunk often upon a mixture of opium, raw spirit, meat juice and powdered pearls, perpetually inquisitive, habitually deceptive, the commander of a large and efficient army, the master of a colourful harem of nubile women and graceful painted boys, and the dictator of human affairs between the Indus and the Afghan passes.
Lord Auckland visited this formidable prince in state, giving him seven horses, an elephant and two howitzers as tokens of his esteem, and Ranjit responded with gorgeous pageantries of his own. The issues they discussed were very grave, the decisions they took momentous. Emily, though, watched their transactions with detached amusement, as though they were all no more than Gothick fantasies, or charades. The King of the Sikhs, she thought, looked like a one-eyed mouse with whiskers; and when he entertained the Governor-General at a banquet, illuminated by 42,000 lamps, attended by his fakir Uziz-ed-Din, with his fire-water in a gold carafe, and two bands to play, and the royal children crawling about the floor, and a party of screaming dancing-girls, and an idiot prince, and a long row of turbaned sirdars, and the tyrant slowly sinking into intoxication, and the future of hundreds of thousands of people, the fate of immense territories, all immediately at stake—‘still’, reported Miss Eden to her sister, ‘we all said “what a charming party”, just as we should have said formerly at Lady C’s or Lady J’s’.1
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br /> 1 Perhaps over-straining herself, for only four years later, returning to Calcutta after service in the China Seas, she blew up and sank.
1 Though the Duke of Wellington as usual got it right, when he assured a jittery fellow-landowner that ‘we shall not have a commotion, we shall not have blood, but we shall be plundered by forms of law’.
1 Until the occupying Italians meanly chipped the inscription off in 1941.
1 To Great and Unconquered Britain the Love of the Maltese and the Voice of Europe Confirms these Islands. The inscription is still there, a little battered now.
1 Notably Tipu’s Tiger, the working model of an Indian tiger eating an Englishman which is still to be shuddered at in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
1 Martin, who died in 1863, produced his first imperial studies without official help, but turned professional later and became the first Treasurer of the Colony of Hong Kong—a possession he declared to be doomed to failure from the start.
1 In 1843: he was an associate of Sir John Soane, but seems to have been, says the Dictionary of National Biography, ‘of too odd and impracticable a nature to ensure prosperity’.
1 Emily Eden died unmarried in 1869, comfortably home in Richmond, a successful novelist, a fashionable hostess, and the author of an entrancing book of Indian letters, Up The Country, from which I have drawn these pictures. Her brother George, alas, will appear again in our narrative.