A History of Britain, Volume 3

by Simon Schama

  The last of Victoria’s many roles – after English rose, model wife and grief-stricken widow – was that of imperial matriarch. As such, she genuinely felt herself to be mother or grandmother to all her people. But in the ever expanding household of her empire there were more and more orphans; millions kept shivering on its doorstep. And, lest the queen become unduly distressed at the spectacle in the streets, there were always servants who Knew What Was Best – to close the carriage blinds until cheerful, loyal throngs could be guaranteed. It is unlikely, for example, that Victoria would have known that on 19 March 1887, in her Jubilee year, fully 27 per cent of the 29,000 working men, when asked about their last job, replied that they were unemployed. A third of those had not worked in over three months. The previous year, in February 1886, she would certainly have noticed that something was unsettled. A mass meeting of unemployed dock and building workers in Trafalgar Square had listened to radical and socialist orators denounce the heartlessness of the rich and the unscrupulousness of capitalists. On their way to Parliament Square, the processing demonstrators were assaulted by missiles thrown from the open windows of Pall Mall clubs where the well-heeled members were jeering. The procession turned into a riot. Gangs looted shops; windows were smashed and carriages overturned.

  Victoria gave Gladstone, whom she thought had no idea how to keep order, a piece of her mind: ‘The Queen cannot sufficiently express her indignation at the monstrous riot which took place in London the other day and which risked people’s lives and was a momentary triumph of socialism and a disgrace to the capital.’ She consoled herself with the certainty (not entirely misplaced) that the vast majority of working people in Britain were of an unrevolutionary temper. When she went to Liverpool and Birmingham as a warm-up for the Jubilee celebrations, she saw nothing but adoring crowds cheering themselves hoarse, even though in Birmingham she had been warned that she would be moving among the ‘roughest’ kind of people. During the summer festivities, tens of thousands of the unemployed who were sleeping in the parks of central London were turfed out and moved on to more remote heaths away from the royal gaze. Some used the open coffins that lay around in undertakers’ yards as improvised beds. When she got to Hyde Park all Victoria saw were 30,000 poor schoolchildren, their faces well scrubbed, who each got a meat pie, a piece of cake and an orange to celebrate the great day. ‘The children sang “God Save the Queen”’, she wrote, ‘somewhat out of tune.’

  All the people whom she really cared about expressed their devotion, starting with her own extended family, which had by now expanded to a small army. Exactly 50 years to the day after she had been woken, an 18-year-old in a nightdress, to be told she was queen, she rode in an open carriage from Buckingham Palace to Westminster, wearing not the state robes that she had been implored to don but her usual black and widow’s cap. In front of the carriage were 12 Indian officers, and in front of them her posterity: ‘My three sons, five sons-in-law, nine grandsons and grand-sons-in-law. Then came the carriages containing my three other daughters, three daughters-in-law, granddaughters, one granddaughter-in-law.’ The evening before, she had been surrounded by this enormous troop of royals, ‘the Princes all in uniform and the Princesses … all beautifully dressed’. Two days later a deputation from ‘The Women of England’ presented her with a gift on behalf of millions of their sex. At Eton, as Victoria was en route to Windsor Castle, it was the boys’ turn. ‘There was a beautiful triumphal arch, made to look exactly like part of the old College and boys dressed like Templars stood on top of it. The whole effect was beautiful, lit up by the sun of a summer evening.’ On the Isle of Wight, the general good cheer was so heartwarming that a toothy smile broke out between the plump cheeks. Her private secretary’s wife, Lady Ponsonby, claimed it happened more often than people imagined, coming ‘very suddenly in the form of a mild radiance over the whole face, a softening, a raising of the lines of the lips, a flash of kindly light beaming from the eyes’.

  It would be like this for the rest of her life, through another Jubilee a decade later: the country bathed in summer evening light; the throngs on the street, much flag-waving; brass bands from barracks and collieries; a great Handel–Harty coda on the opening night of the big round Albert Hall, finished at last. But that reminded her that there was someone missing from the family photographs. In Westminster Abbey, in June 1887, she felt the sudden pang and wrote that ‘I sat alone (OH!) without my beloved husband for whom this would have been such a proud day.’ It would be another 14 years before she would be reunited with ‘him to whom I and the nation owe so much’. Sir Henry Frederick Ponsonby, her private secretary, said that there was nothing Victoria enjoyed so much as arranging funerals, and her own was no exception. This would be the one occasion when, in anticipation of her reunion, she would doff the widow’s black. When she had taken Tennyson into the mausoleum at Frogmore, ‘I observed that it was light and bright, which he thought a great point.’ So Victoria ordered an all white funeral. The queen was robed in white, her body covered with cheerful sprays of spring flowers like some bedecked virgin bride. Some of them, however, had to be tactfully placed since, along with the locks of hair, rings and many other keepsakes she had ordered to be placed in the coffin with her, there was also, embarrassingly, in her left hand, a photograph of John Brown; it was carefully concealed by lilies and freesias.

  There was another problem, too, that Victoria had left for the managers of the obsequies. For, when Albert’s memorial effigy had been ordered from the sculptor Carlo Marochetti in 1862, Victoria had insisted on hers being made at the same time, and in the likeness of her at exactly the time the prince had been taken from her. (If anything Marochetti followed his orders too well, and made Victoria seem more like she had been when they were first married.) They were supposed to be reunited, at least in marble, at the same age they had been in the glowing prime of their union. The trouble was that this had been so long ago that no one could seem to remember where the Victoria sculpture was. It was finally discovered behind one of the walls of a renovated room in Windsor Castle. The image of a young, medieval princess lies next to her preux chevalier as if the clocks had stopped along with the heart of the Prince Consort.

  But Albert, above all others, knew that they had not; that progress had indeed been the mainspring of his modern century. By 1900 that progress had extended beyond anything he could have imagined – and not just to science, technology and commerce, but to the lives of Britain’s women. Education and politics had begun to give the angels in the house an altogether earthier set of ambitions. And those subtle but powerful revolutionaries, the latch key, the cheque book and the bicycle, would go a long way to realizing them.

  Young ladies would never be quite the same. Riding with the body of Queen Victoria from London to Windsor was Lady Lytton, the widow of one of her viceroys of India, the Earl of Lytton. Seven years later her daughter Lady Constance, in prison as a militant suffragette, hunger-striker and compulsive cell-scrubber, would make her statement about the future of women in Britain by desecrating the ‘temple of purity’ so slavishly adored by the fetishists of domestic life. Her idea was to carve the slogan of her movement on her upper body all the way up to her face. She chose a piece of broken enamel from a hatpin as her tool of mutilation, but it took her 20 minutes to carve a great ‘V’ on her breast before the prison officers caught her in the act. Never mind. ‘Con’ had made her statement. It was ‘V’ not for Victoria, but for Votes.

  CHAPTER

  5

  THE EMPIRE OF

  GOOD INTENTIONS:

  INVESTMENTS

  THE BRITISH EMPIRE, Lord Curzon could state without fear of contradiction, was quite simply ‘the greatest force for good the world has ever seen’. And he, perhaps, was its purest personification. Curzon was, at any rate, exceptionally, almost unnaturally, white. Someone who saw him in his prime as viceroy of India described him as having ‘the complexion of a milkmaid and the stature of Apollo’. (Years later, seeing Tommies bathi
ng in the First World War, Curzon would be astonished how white the skins of the working class could be once scraped of grime and, one supposes, blood.) The viceroy’s bearing was conspicuously erect, the ramrod posture only partly the effect of the steel and leather backbrace he had been forced to wear since adolescence. Every day, he composed himself into an expression of stoic indifference to discomfort. It was the perfect pose of paramountcy; the burden that weighed but did not crush.

  Puffers of empire, like J. R. Seeley, the Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, talked often and loudly of Britain’s civilizing ‘destiny’. But Curzon didn’t need lectures. He knew in his aching bones that he had been summoned to rule. To a well-intentioned friend who presumed to suggest he might be a little less unyielding in his views he retorted, ‘I was born so, you cannot change me.’ Born and raised, it seemed, for the very architecture of the Viceroy’s House in Calcutta was a virtual copy of his house in Derbyshire, Kedleston Hall. Curzon had first seen the Calcutta edifice in 1887, 11 years before he became viceroy, and declared it, morally as well as architecturally, home from home. Prophetically, Robert Adam’s 18th-century façade at Kedleston had incorporated a solidified version of the Arch of Constantine in Rome. So George Nathaniel Curzon, with his aquiline nose and conqueror’s jaw-line, would have been stirred, early on, like all boys of the British ruling classes steeped in classicism, by visions of imperial triumph. (Emperor Constantine, the boy prodigy would have known, was supposed to have been born in northern Britannia.) Eton, Balliol and All Souls would have done nothing to dilute this precocious sense of vocation. Nor would his appointment as private secretary to the most unapologetically imperialist of all the Victorian prime ministers: Lord Salisbury. Not content with being made under-secretary at the India Office when he was just 32, at the first possible opportunity Curzon nominated himself for the viceroyalty and, to decreasing astonishment, got the job. So when the moment to fulfil all this long-heralded potential arrived and Curzon entered his Calcutta Kedleston in 1899, with his Irish peerage fresh-minted for the occasion and his American vicereine, Mary, rich and glamorous, at his side, it must have seemed only right that he should be greeted by the bust of Augustus Caesar.

  Curzon knew all about oriental empires. He had travelled the Silk Road and had written elegantly three books on Russian imperial ambitions in Central Asia and Persia. So he also knew that great Asiatic empires were expected to express their majesty in magnificent monuments. Building such edifices was not just a matter of vulgar bragging: the Raj owed it to its subjects to give them a sense of the strength and endurance of the power to which they were fortunate enough to be subjected. And it went without saying that, at the dawn of the British Empire’s fourth century, it seemed its staying power could be taken for granted, at least for the foreseeable future. And why should he not think this? The Union Jack flew over a fifth of the globe and nearly a quarter of its population – some 372 million by the turn of the century. In June 1897, 50,000 troops from every corner of the empire – Camel Corps and Gurkhas, Canadian hussars and Jamaicans in white gaiters, the procession led by the loftiest officer in the army, 6-foot-8 Captain Ames of the Horse Guards – had marched or trotted through London to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. The tabloid imperialist press (above all, the Daily Mail) had been ecstatic; the crowds drunk with top-nation elation. Up and down the country, on 22 June schoolchildren were given the day off, herded into parks and, courtesy of the queen, given two buns and an orange. Mass singing of the national anthem was reinforced by a new ‘Imperial March’ composed for the Jubilee by Edward Elgar. The queen, now very lame, conceded just enough to the delirium to decorate her black satin with Cape ostrich feathers.

  Even the most swollen-headed imperialist was not such a fool as to need reminding by the likes of Kipling that all this too, some day, would pass. But that day, surely, was a long, long way off. On the evening of Curzon’s installation in Calcutta there was a viceregal banquet and ball. George wore a mantle of sky blue silk. ‘The message is carved granite,’ he wrote, ‘it is hewn in the rock of doom, that our work is righteous and it shall endure.’

  So when the queen passed away in January 1901, Curzon lost no time in commissioning a great monument to her memory. It would be, he told the committee responsible for drafting designs, ‘a standing record of our wonderful history, a visible monument of Indian glories and an illustration more eloquent than any spoken address or printed page, of the lessons of public patriotism and civic duty’. It would, in fact, be the British Taj Mahal. The Taj was much on Curzon’s mind since it had been he who had made it beautiful again. He had cleared out the bazaars in front of it and restored Shah Jehan’s exquisite reflecting pools. The Calcutta Victoria Memorial Monument would also have water gardens and it would even be faced with marble drawn from the same Makrana quarries in Rajasthan that had supplied the stone for the Taj. But there the resemblance would stop. The Taj Mahal was often called a poem in stone; the perfect lament of an imperial widower. But Curzon was not interested in architectural sorrow. His building would be more in the way of a proclamation. As befitted the heirs to the Mughals, there would be references to their architecture and subtle allusions to Hindu temple vernacular. But the overwhelming impression that the building would give, expressed in dome and colonnades, would be of an edifice built by the Romans of the modern age; the carriers of a civilization supported by wisdom and engineered for justice and progress. It must have seemed right, then, to entrust much of the building to Vincent Esch, whose reputation had been built as assistant chief engineer to the Bengal and Nagpur Railway.

  Ground was broken in 1904. Two years later the most uncompromising, brilliant and adamant of India’s viceroys was gone, leaving behind at Government House an ornate £50,000 electric lift (still in working order today) and a government in Bengal that was almost completely broken down by riots, strikes and boycotts. Curzon’s lordly plan to partition Bengal had raised a hornets’ nest of discontent. ‘Hundreds of poor ignorant natives are being paid to hold up placards (frequently upside down) with English inscriptions painted upon them in Calcutta’ was his patrician dismissal of the mass agitation. But his authority had been broken by it all the same. Arriving as the epitome of benevolent autocracy, the viceroy who worked 14 hours a day, who prided himself on knowing everything from the price of rice in Madras to the number of chickens ordered for a state dinner (always too many!), Curzon left in impotent, exhausted dismay, pursued by shouts of ‘Bande mataram!’ (Hail motherland!), the first great slogan of the movement for swaraj or self-rule. This is how the endgame of the empire would play out: grandeur mocked by chaos. By the time that the British vision of a great new capital city at Delhi had been realized by Herbert Baker and Edwin Lutyens in 1921, and the Victoria Memorial Monument in Calcutta had been completed, the writing was already on the wall for the Raj. The incoming viceroy, Lord Irwin, would be greeted (like his successors, Lords Minto and Hardinge) with a bomb. He would survive, but illusions of benevolent imperial endurance would not.

  Even in 1901, there had been those who had their doubts about whether a British pseudo-Taj was, in fact, the best way for the revenues of India to be spent. In the same year that Curzon announced the grandiose project, the medical journal The Lancet – not given to incendiary statements – lamented that during the previous decade the excess deaths (over the usual high rates) in India from famine and disease had been at least 19 million, or, as the journal expressed it, the equivalent of half the population of the United Kingdom. The horrifying famine that had gripped western and central India in 1899–1900 had taken, according to a reliable modern historian, Burton Stein, at least 6.5 million lives (W. Arthur Lewis puts it at more like 10 million). In 1901 alone a quarter of a million, mostly in and around Bombay, had died from bubonic plague. In 1903, during the staging of the durbar that proclaimed Edward VII as Emperor of India, Lalmohan Ghosh, the president of the Indian National Congress, asked rhetorically, ‘Do you think that any
administration in England, France or the United States would have ventured to waste vast sums of money on an empty pageant when Famine and Pestilence are stalking over the land and the Angel of Death was flapping his wings almost within hearing of the light-hearted revellers?’

  By the time Curzon’s viceroyalty ended in 1905, 3 million had perished from that epidemic. Cholera had taken an even more savage toll. Even average Indian death rates, which in the 1880s had been at the already shocking level of 41.3 per 1000, had risen, by the time the Memorial Monument was completed, to 48.6 per 1000. So the period when its triumphalists were boasting most noisily of the material and medical benefits that the British had brought to the subcontinent happened also to be the decades when India experienced the most horrific death-toll in its entire modern history. In the regions most stricken by the turn-of-the-century droughts and epidemics, like Orissa, Gujarat, Rajasthan and the United Provinces, they reached over 90 per 1000, or one in 11 of the population. An earlier famine in Orissa in 1865–6 had, according to government sources, killed fully a quarter of the population. And there is, of course, no memorial to those victims. But if you look carefully at the statuary in front of the Victoria Memorial you will find grateful natives being succoured at the breast of the Mother Raj.

  What in God’s name had happened? The white sahibs and memsahibs who sat at their desks, played out their chukkas, danced and drank in the clubs, lorded it in the courts, gathered the revenues, built the railways and extolled the blessings they had brought were not monsters of hard-hearted callousness. They had – most of them – only the very best of intentions. They shared Curzon’s confidence that the British Empire was the greatest the world had ever seen. Its splendour was, its celebrants believed, to be measured not by square miles or millions of subjects, still less by battleships and Gatling guns, but by its incontrovertible altruism. There was indeed money to be made, and the Russian bear to be kept from getting his hairy paws on it. But what was that beside the noble dedication to eradicating poverty, disease and ignorance, which was the truly British imperial mission? Peoples whose worlds had been crippled by those maladies for who knew how long (it was invariably a much shorter time than the British supposed) would be healed. India would one day rise and walk again on its own two feet and be judged (by the British) capable once more of governing itself. On that great day of magnanimous self-liquidation, the ‘heaven-born’ (as the Indian Civil Service liked to call itself) would depart in peace leaving its erstwhile charges grateful, devoted, peaceful, prosperous and – this was the special bonus for that future modern world – free. Long after it had gone, historians would pronounce the world to have been a better place for the existence of the British Empire.