Heaven’s Command

by Jan Morris

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  Such were two of the Empire’s white settlement colonies. They had this in common, with each other as with most of the British communities abroad, that they thought very highly of themselves. Most of their settlers were, by English standards, plain uncomplicated people—‘bare-minded’, Bagehot was to call them—but they were less than modest in their attitudes. ‘The people of this Colony,’ wrote an English official in Tasmania in the 1840s, ‘very much resemble the Americans in their presumption, ignorance, arrogance and conceit. They believe they are the most remarkable men on the Globe, and that their Island “whips all Creation”.’

  It was not surprising that most of them had long been pressing for responsible Government. The Canterbury Pilgrims did so almost the moment they landed, Godley himself maintaining that he would rather be ruled by a tyrant on the spot than by a board of archangels 3,000 miles away, and some of the most passionate advocates of self-rule in Australia were men recently emancipated from the particular frustrations of Her Majesty’s prisons. In the Canadian colonies, in South Africa, even in the decaying Caribbean islands, self-rule was vociferously and sometimes scurrilously demanded. Successive British Governments, remembering 1775, and not at all sure what would be best for the colonists, for the subject natives or for Britain herself, muffled the issue and marked time: but in 1838 Lord Melbourne had placed the problem on the lap of Radical Jack, and presently received in response the Durham Report.

  Durham himself had been recalled from Canada because he exceeded his constitutional powers in dealing with the leaders of a rebellion, but his report was among the most important documents in the whole history of the Empire. It formulated a new relationship between London and the white colonies, and thus shaped the pattern of the Victorian Empire as a whole. Durham was an imaginative man, and he took with him on his Canadian mission the ubiquitous Wakefield and another well-known Colonial Reformer, Charles Buller. The Report was presented to Parliament in February 1839 (but much of it had already been leaked to The Times, perhaps by Wakefield). It was in effect an endorsement of the fundamental Wakefieldian thesis—that the colonies should be cherished as extensions of English society, and therefore competent to govern their own affairs. Not everyone admired it. Lord Brougham the law reformer observed to Macaulay that its matter came from a swindler (Wakefield), its style from a coxcomb (Buller), while ‘the Dictator furnished only six letters, D-U-R-H-A-M’. Much of it was concerned only with the more immediate object of Durham’s mission, the settlement of differences between French and English Canada. But it became a charter for British colonial development, a fresh start after the disasters of half a century before. The Durham Report advocated nearly complete self-government for the advanced white colonies, with only foreign relations, constitution-making, overseas trade and the disposal of public lands left in the authority of Westminster. Colonial governors would no longer be local autocrats, but would be responsible directly to the elected legislature of the colony, and thus no more able to decree the course of local events than was the Queen herself in London.

  Radical Jack never saw it implemented, for he died in 1840, aged 48: but its genius was soon recognized, and in his own home country, between Durham and Sunderland, they built in 1844 a proper memorial to its meaning—a many-columned Doric temple, proud, high and lonely on Penshaw moor.1

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  It was because of this now celebrated report that Sir John Harvey of Nova Scotia, not the most distinguished of Colonial Governors, not indeed remembered for anything else at all, received his instructions from London that November day in 1846. The publication of the Durham Report had caused excitement throughout the Empire, the Colonial Reformers hailing it as the start of a new era, the evangelists wondering if it would mean abandoning the heathen to colonial brutalism, the petty grandees of Nassau or Toronto fearing it might mean the end of their happy hegemonies. For years nothing came of it. Successive British Governments, Whig and Tory, doubted whether it was practicable as a programme for colonial progress. Could responsible Government be anything but independent Government? Would it not mean the end of the white settlement Empire anyway? Would abandonment be more profitable? Would it be better to wait and see?

  But in 1846 Lord John Russell’s Government came into office. Its Colonial Secretary was Lord Grey, Durham’s brother-in-law, and among his advisers was Charles Buller. Now at last the Report was accepted as imperial policy, and the ideas of the Colonial Reformers were vindicated. In November Sir John Harvey received his dispatch from home. ‘I have to … instruct you,’ it said, ‘to abstain from changing your Executive Council until it shall have become perfectly clear that they are unable, with such fair support from yourself as they have a right to expect, to carry on the government of the province satisfactorily and command the confidence of the Legislature…. It cannot too distinctly be acknowledged that it is neither possible nor desirable to carry on the government of any of the British provinces in North America in opposition to the wishes of the inhabitants.’

  In this historic instruction, the first of its kind in imperial history, the British formally recognized that the Victorian Empire was to be different in kind from the settlement empire of the eighteenth century. Its overseas Britons were to be trusted not to break away from the Crown, but to adhere to it in liberty, and to live in the British way without coercion, as they would at home. The doctrine was formulated that an Englishman took with him to the colonies ‘as much of law and liberty as the nature of things would bear’. Within twenty years all the bigger white settlements would have responsible Government, only the plantation colonies of the West Indies continuing with their quaint old constitutions, and would become in most respects sovereign nations, distant diagrams or figures of Britain, honouring the Queen independently and at a distance. Here is the oath of allegiance sworn by the parliamentarians of Tasmania, then called Van Diemen’s Land, when the first self-governing assembly met in Hobart:

  I do seriously promise and swear, That I will be faithful and bear true Allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Victoria, as lawful Sovereign of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and of this Colony of Van Dieman’s Land, dependent on and belonging to the said United Kingdom; and that I will defend Her to the utmost of my Power against all traitorous Conspiracies or Attempts whatever which shall be made against Her Person, Crown and Dignity; and that I will do my utmost Endeavour to disclose and make known to Her Majesty, Her Heirs and Successors, all Treasons and traitorous Conspiracies and Attempts which I shall know to be against Her or any of them; and all this I do swear without any Equivocation, mental Evasion,’ or secret Reservation, and renouncing all Pardons and Dispensations from any Person or Persons whatever to the contrary. SO HELP ME GOD!

  The new nations overseas would prove the most durable, and the most noble, of the imperial achievements, as the American Ralph Waldo Emerson realized: ‘I have noted the reserve of power in the English temperament. In the island, they never let out all the length of all the reins, there is no Berserkir rage, no abandonment or ecstasy of will or intellect…. But who would see the uncoiling of that tremendous spring, the explosion of their well-husbanded forces, must follow the swarms which, pouring now for two hundred years from the British islands, have sailed, and rode, and traded, and planted, through all climates … carrying the Saxon seed, with its instinct for liberty and law, for arts and for thought—acquiring under some skies a more electric energy than the native air allows—to the conquest of the globe’.

  Sir John Harvey was not at first pleased by the prospect. He had no faith in responsible government for colonials, had trouble enough already with the Nova Scotians, and recognized in the Durham Report irritating echoes of local agitations. He obeyed his orders nevertheless. When, at the next election, the Nova Scotia Reformers returned a handsome majority, and Sir John’s nominated Ministers were obliged to resign, instead of naming another Government of his own he did what constitutional figureheads must, and called upon the Opposition to
form a Government. Now everything really did go on, as Dickens had prematurely judged, ‘just as it does at home’.

  1 Directed in Lower Canada against a soldier-Governor of the old school, Sir Francis Bond Head, who had allegedly been knighted by William IV for his skill in throwing a lassoo.

  1 Australia never was annexed as an entity, but when ‘a gentleman attached to the French Government’ once asked the Colonial Secretary, Lord John Russell, how much of it was British, ‘I answered him “the whole”, and with that answer he went away’.

  2 ‘The ancient profession of picking pockets,’ as Sydney Smith once wrote, ‘will certainly not become more discreditable from the knowledge that it may eventually lead to the possession of a farm of a thousand acres on the River Hawkesbury.’

  1 It was by Edward Blore (1787-1879) who had already become famous as the architect of Sir Walter Scott’s new Gothic house at Abbotsford, and who gave the finishing touches to Nash’s Buckingham Palace. He never visited the site, but his Government House is still there.

  1 She died in 1855, a well-known Sydney grande dame, and one of her grandsons became Premier of Tasmania.

  1 The Sydney of the 1840s can still, with difficulty, be traced. A few of those grand terraces survive—Lower Fort Street, for instance, which stands demurely in the shadow of the Harbour Bridge—and so does the Lord Nelson. The Rocks have mostly been cleaned up, and with the harbour quarter are about to be fallen upon by enlightened developers. The botanical gardens are as lovely as ever. Below Government House stands the former Empire’s most startling architectural tour-de-force, the winged Sydney Opera House. Macquarie’s plans for a truly monumental city, which embraced a castle and a huge piazza with a cathedral in it, are represented most piquantly by the Conservatorium of Music—erected as stables for a new Government House (to be based upon Thornbury Castle in Gloucestershire, ‘only bolder’) which was never even started.

  1 130 years later the Maoris are still disputing the Treaty of Waitangi, which scarcely kept them in full possession of their ancestral rights, but they have achieved positions of great power in the State, and are probably the most thoroughly assimilated of all the old Empire’s indigenous subjects.

  1 The last of all the Pilgrims, the Reverend Frederick Brittan, who had disembarked at Lyttleton in 1850, died in 1945, after seventy-four years as a priest in the diocese of Christchurch.

  1 Still, to my mind, the greatest of all the lapidary memorials of the British Empire, and marvellous to see on a misty morning from the Newcastle road, when it looks like a last monument to the Empire itself.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  An Act of God

  IN the county of Cork in south-west Ireland lay the village of Schull, which took its name from a monkly school, scoil in the Gaelic, long since vanished and forgotten. It was only a straggle of mud cabins and shanties along the waterfront, treeless hills behind, in front a bleak and complicated inlet from the sea called Roaring Water Bay. There was a little church near the shore, and a Catholic chapel, and down at the quay the sinister black curraghs of the fishermen, black leather over wood frames, were drawn up like gleaming eels on the shingle. There was no city for many miles, only the hangdog town of Skibbereen—‘Skib’ for short—on the road to the east: over all hung the watery green-gold light of western Ireland—which, with its scoured and limpid glow, was not unlike that radiance we imagined from the ramparts of Fort Prince of Wales on Hudson Bay.

  Into this melancholy settlement, in February 1847, there sailed Her Majesty’s Steam Sloop Scourge (Commander Caffyn). She tied up at the quay below the church, and her captain went ashore: and the report he later made upon what he found there is one of the most horrific of all imperial documents. Schull was in a state of nightmare. The weather was bitter, the village was half derelict, and most of the people were in the last stages of starvation. Some were like living skeletons, some had weirdly swollen stomachs or distended limbs. Here and there corpses lay upon the ground, half-eaten by rats, or gnawed at by starving dogs: elsewhere putrifying masses of flesh had been thrown into shallow pits. In one hut Commander Caffyn found a group of seven people crouched silent beside a peat fire, while from an adjacent room came the screams of a woman, lying like a pile of bones upon her bed, dementedly demanding food. There were children with jaws so distended that they could not speak, men with bodies swollen to twice their normal size, babies with arms like little sticks, men with the blotched blackened skins of scurvy, boys whose heads of hair were reduced to patches, but upon whose faces a downy growth had eerily appeared, making them look, attenuated as they were and often silent with hunger, like poor enervated apes.

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  The captain was sickened but not surprised, for this was the Great Irish Famine, another catalytic episode in the history of Victoria’s Empire, and all over Ireland that year such horrors were commonplace. The famine was caused by a disease which had destroyed the potato crop throughout the island, and had in a few months reduced a population of exceptional stalwart health to the brink of extermination.

  The Irish peasantry lived almost entirely upon the potato, eating in ordinary times the staggering average of 14 lb a day per head, and this vegetable, boiled, stewed, served in soups, made into bread, gave them all the sustenance they needed, and so supplied them with vitamins and calories that they were among the biggest people in Europe. ‘There are some things too serious for joking,’ an old Irish saying had it, ‘and one of them is the potato.’ Crops had often failed before, and at any time there were Irishmen near the starvation level, but the Great Famine was exceptional because it was so widespread and because it lasted for several years: the crop failed partially in 1845, wholly in 1846, wholly again in 1848. The disease, which came from America and had appeared patchily in England and on the continent, was dramatically sudden in effect. Overnight an entire crop could be blighted, the leaves black, the stem brittle, and in a few days a promising potato field might be reduced to a mess of rotting vegetation. Even potatoes which seemed healthy when dug presently began to rot: and the peasants, who habitually stored potatoes for the winter season in shallow pits, found that not only their growing crops, but their stores of provision too, were utterly devastated at a blow.

  With famine came disease. Typhus and relapsing fever spread throughout Ireland, ravaging bodies debilitated already by hunger, filth and vermin. Dysentery became epidemic, the ground around the cabins at Schull being blotched with its tell-tale clots of blood. Scurvy was everywhere. Viruses of all kinds were carried from town to town, door to door, by the wolfish half-starved beggars who roamed the countryside. The island was in despair. Perhaps never before, at least since the Middle Ages, had a corner of Europe been so horribly devastated. The hospitals, the workhouses, the prisons were packed with starving destitutes, and Caffyn, like most visitors to the ravaged west, found himself surrounded by crowds of half-mad, half-dead people, often nearly naked, desperate with hunger and disease—‘in a few minutes’, wrote one visitor to Skibbereen, ‘I was surrounded by at least twenty such phantoms, such frightful spectres as no words can describe. Their demoniac yells are still ringing in my ears, and their horrible images are fixed upon my brain’. The workhouse admittance sheets for the period are pitifully classified—‘Sickly and lame’, ‘Sickly and cripple, very dirty’, ‘Occupation begging, very dirty’. In Skibbereen workhouse half the children admitted soon died—‘from diarrhoea’, reported the doctor, ‘acting on an exhausted condition’.

  So dependent were the Irish upon the potato, by force of habit as by economic circumstance, that they had scarcely tried any other food—such grain as they grew they could not eat, because they used it to pay their rents. Now they were reduced to roots, weeds and berries. ‘I confess myself unmanned’, wrote one sensitive Welsh observer, ‘by the intensity and extent of the suffering I witnessed, especially among the women and little children, crowds of whom were to be seen scattered over the turnip fields like a flock of famishing crows, devouring raw turnips,
mothers half naked, shivering in the snow and sleet, uttering exclamations of despair while their children were screaming with hunger. I am a match for anything else I may meet with here, but this I cannot stand.’ There were reports of dying people eaten alive by dogs: in Kenmare the parish priest entered a cottage to find a live man lying in bed with his dead wife and two dead children, while nearby a cat ate the body of a third child.

  Probably a million people died in the Great Famine—most of them from the diseases of malnutrition. The population of Ireland was recorded in 1841 as 8 million, and the island was among the most densely populated parts of Europe. By 1851 death and migration had reduced it to 6½ million, and wide areas of countryside stood derelict and abandoned. All over Ireland, from poor Schull and delirious Skibbereen to the once prosperous farmsteads of Ulster, there arose the Irish mourning cry—that terrible keening wail, that howl of women’s voices, to the grave chanting of verses and clapping of hands, with which this people greeted the advent of death.

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  ‘Am I,’ Mr Michael Shaughnessy, a barrister, asked himself incredulously, surveying these ghastly scenes in 1848, ‘am I in … a part of the British Empire?’ He was. Ireland was the nearest overseas possession of the Crown, and excepting only lesser islands of the British seas, the oldest too. It had been a British possession for 700 years, since Henry II had first sent his armies across the Irish Sea, and settled his Anglo-Norman knights within the fertile enclave of the Pale. Since then successive ‘plantations’ of Scotsmen and Englishmen had been settled there, and a governing class of Anglo-Irish Protestants had come into being, but still the island was never subdued or Anglicized. It remained an intensely foreign place. The Irish peasantry was passionately but primitively Catholic, still speaking the ancient Gaelic tongue, and honouring in the folk-memory all the saints, kings, heroes, poets and jesters of their own Celtic tradition—a lyric tradition, expressed long before in an airy and fanciful love of nature and of liberty: