Raffles

by Victoria Glendinning

  It was a hinge-moment for Raffles. Joseph Conrad, in his novel The Shadow Line, one of his tales of the East Indies, wrote that it was the privilege of youth ‘to live in advance of its days in all the beautiful continuity of hope.’ Time passes, ‘till one perceives ahead a shadow line warning one that the region of early youth, too, must be left behind.’ Reality takes over from aspiration. Conrad’s protagonist crosses his shadow line when he is given his first command of a ship, with the daunting prospect of navigating between the islands of the Archipelago: ‘But I felt no apprehension. I was familiar enough with the Archipelago by that time… The road would be long. All roads are long that lead to one’s heart’s desire. But this road my mind’s eye could see on a chart, professionally, with all its complications and difficulties, yet simple enough in a way. One is a seaman or one is not. And I had no doubt of being one.’

  With danger and responsibilities ahead, Raffles, at sea, passes over his own shadow line. The fleet anchored in the Bay of Batavia on 4 August 1811.

  Chapter 5

  The Lieutenant-Governor of Java

  1811–1812

  The fleet assembled off the coast of Java ‘without the loss of a single spar, or slightest accident, having passed by a route previously almost unknown, and accomplished passage declared to be impracticable,’ Raffles wrote to Cousin Thomas eight years later, in the letter of 14 October 1819: ‘I will not attempt to say what my feelings were on that occasion.’ His arguments for the controversial route were justified. The responsibility had been awful, ‘and the relief which I felt was proportionate.’

  Troops, ordnance, horses and supplies were landed during the evening of 3 August 1811. Raffles remained on the Modeste with Lord Minto and the other non-combatants, receiving despatches from the field. The invasion force disembarked about twelve miles from Batavia. John Leyden was first on shore, prancing through the shallows dressed up as a pirate. He ‘bore the brunt of the attack,’ recorded the contemptuous Captain Taylor, ‘which came from a flock of barn-door fowls headed by an aggressive rooster.’

  The advance division under Colonel Gillespie found Batavia almost deserted. Janssens had withdrawn the French army, plus the principal Dutch, to the fortified military post of Meester Cornelis. The British found the store-houses broken open. ‘I do not exaggerate,’ wrote Captain Taylor, ‘when I say that the streets were covered with coffee and pepper as with gravel, and in other places quantities of sugar.’ Colonel Gillespie had Batavia under occupation by 9 September, but it was hardly glorious, and the main battle was to come.

  The British army marched on south, past the deserted French military Cantonment at Weltesvreden, and encountered serious enemy opposition. Colonel Gillespie attacked ‘with spirit and judgment’ as General Sir Samuel Auchtermuty, the Commander-in-Chief, reported to Minto, and ‘at the point of the bayonet, completely routed their forces’ with ‘trifling’ loss of life. On 14 August Minto and his party came ashore and established themselves in ‘a good spacious house’ south of the town at Weltesvreden. Raffles and Leyden were nearby in a house belonging to a departed Dutch official on the canal at Molenvliet.

  The enemy – the ‘E’ as Captain Taylor called them – were superior in numbers. As Gillespie and his division moved forward there was close combat (‘hard service’ was the military term). Sometimes, Taylor said, Colonel Gillespie positioned himself provocatively and seemed ‘really disappointed if they will not fire at him.’ He collapsed with fatigue, but carried on after a swig of grog.

  At dawn on 26 September, as General Auchtermuty reported, ‘the assault was made, the principal attack entrusted to that gallant and experienced officer, Colonel Gillespie,’ who met the E’s advance, ‘routed it in an instant, and with a rapidity never surpassed, and under a heavy fire of grape and musketry, possessed himself of the advanced redoubt.’ So it continued ‘till the whole of the enemy’s army was killed, captured, or dispersed.’

  The carnage was horrible. ‘About 1000 have been buried in the works; multitudes were cut down in the retreat; the rivers are choked up with the dead, and the huts and woods were filled with the wounded, who have since expired.’ Five thousand prisoners were taken. General Janssens was thrice invited to surrender by Minto’s aide-de-camp Captain William Robison (not to be confused with William Robinson), who had a Dutch wife so spoke some Dutch. Janssens refused, and retreated to Samarang, where he formally capitulated.

  As for Gillespie, ‘he was everywhere.’ It was conventional for a Commander-in-Chief to single out brave officers for special mention, but Auchtermuty’s repeated lauding of the ‘gallantry, energy, and judgment’ of Colonel Gillespie was more hyperbolic than usual. Robert Rollo Gillespie was a compelling character and inspired adulation in his men. His small, girlish physique was deceptive. He was a testosterone-fuelled dynamo. Already in his mid-forties by 1811, he was known as ‘Rollicking Rollo’ in his home town in Co. Down in the north of Ireland.

  Major William Thorn, who fought beside him, wrote Gillespie’s biography – a saga of eloping, duelling, escaping from the law in disguise, being court martialled for financial irregularities, surviving an assassination attempt in Jamaica… Major Thorn’s stories about his hero grow tall. Behind his narrative you hear Gillespie in Java, regaling the younger men with extravagant anecdotes about his exploits over multiple bumpers of brandy. But in 1806 Colonel Robert Rollo Gillespie, borderline psychopath, had achieved fame when, in the south Indian town of Vellore, sepoys in the Company’s army broke out in violent mutiny.

  The sepoys had mutinied against insensitive regulations – Hindu soldiers must not wear caste-marks, Muslims must shave off their beards, and all must wear a hat with a cow-hide cockade. The defeated Tipu Sultan of Mysore, living under house arrest within Vellore Fort, was on the side of the rebels. On the night of 10 July the sepoys in the Fort broke out, and by dawn were in control of the Fort. An officer escaped and rode the sixteen miles to Arcot to raise the alarm. He met Gillespie, Commandant of the garrison, enjoying a dawn ride. Gillespie turned his horse around, alerted a relief force, and then galloped off on his own to Vellore.

  Gillespie shinned up the Fort on a rope and led the surviving British officers in a bayonet charge. When his dragoons arrived, he had them blow up the gates of the Fort, and the cavalry stormed in. He lined up a hundred rebels against a wall and had them shot. John Blakiston, the engineer who blew up the gates, found it hard in retrospect to ‘approve the deed’. Equally harsh deeds were done after the mutineers were brought to trial – some were shot out of cannon, others by firing squad, others hanged.

  The British officers who had imposed the offensive regulations were eventually disciplined and the orders countermanded. But Gillespie was credited with having saved the Carnatic, the six hundred-mile strip of land on the south-east coast of India. The East India Company voted him ‘a handsome present’ said to be £2,500. Gillespie himself thought he was insufficiently rewarded. There was an underlying resentment and sense of entitlement in Colonel Gillespie.

  The patriotic poet Henry Newbolt, born 1862, wrote a jingling fourteen-stanza ballad about the ‘Hero of Vellore’, ending:

  They’ve kept the tale a hundred years,

  They’ll keep the tale a hundred more:

  Riding at dawn, riding alone,

  Gillespie came to false Vellore.

  Gillespie, like Raffles, became part of the mythology of Empire.

  ‘Colonel Gillespie will be left in command of the troops on the island,’ wrote Lord Minto. ‘He has been the great hero, and the chief means of our success.’ Raffles as Lieutenant-Governor would represent the civil authority, and Gillespie, as Commander of the Forces, the military authority. Maybe foreseeing trouble, Minto underlined the recognised seniority of the civil power, ‘strongly recommending’ to the Secret Committee of the East India Company that this arrangement ‘may not be superseded for the purpose of uniting the Government in the same person with the command of the Army.’

  John Ley
den, the day before the assault on Cornelis, went into the library at Batavia to investigate the Dutch archives, and then into a depository said to contain antiquities. This room had long been closed up, and when Leyden emerged he was shivering and feverish.

  When Raffles tried to tell Leyden about the victory at Cornelis, he was too ill to take it in. He died on 28 August, with Raffles at his side, and was buried on the same day in the Tanah Abang burial ground in Batavia, with Raffles and Minto in attendance. Raffles paid the funeral expenses. ‘I attended him from the first to the last,’ Raffles wrote to Leyden’s friend William Erskine in Bombay, asking Erskine to send out a ‘handsome and appropriate tombstone or slab engraven on it what you please.’

  Leyden’s chest-tomb has two engraved slabs on its top, one giving the details of his birth and death, and the other – whether composed by Erskine or Raffles – celebrating his scholarship and his character: ‘His principles as a man were pure and spotless – and as a friend he was firm and sincere. Few have passed through this life with fewer vices or with a greater prospect of happiness in the next.’

  In a preface to his History of Java Raffles was to pay further tribute: ‘There was one, dear to me in private friendship and esteem, who, had he lived, was of all men best calculated to have supplied the deficiencies in the very imperfect work now presented to the public…but just as he reached those shores on which he hoped to slake his ardent thirst for knowledge, he fell a victim to excessive exertion, deeply deplored by all, and by none more truly than myself.’ Sir Walter Scott, the friend and patron of Leyden back home, published a biographical memoir of him in The Edinburgh Annual Register, and a poem:

  Quenched is his lamp of varied lore,

  That loved the light of song to pour;

  A distant and a deadly shore

  Has Leyden’s cold remains!

  Whether Leyden would have been an able or responsible right-hand man for Raffles when it came to the nuts and bolts of administration is doubtful. ‘He was to have been my private Secretary, and in this capacity, what would he not have done, with the latitude I should have given him?’ wrote Raffles to one of the executors. This loss was a personal disaster for Raffles. He was bereaved not only of his ‘dearest friend’ but of his inspiration, his daemon.

  Lord Minto sent a triumphant despatch reporting the conquest of Java to the Secretary for War and the Colonies, Lord Liverpool. He received a congratulatory reply; his communication had been ‘laid before His Royal Highness the Prince Regent’ and it was his Royal Highness’ intention to confer medals on the principal officers ‘in conformity to the principle which has of late been adopted with respect to the Campaigns in Spain and Portugal.’

  This was gratifying. But the British in 1811 were more concerned about ‘the Campaigns in Spain and Portugal’ than in the acquisition by the East India Company of an island on the other side of the world. One of the effects of Raffles’ initial posting to Penang was that his talents, his ideals and his hopes of fame remained anchored in the Eastern Isles – hence his expansionist vision for the region. In 1811 there was little hope of making Java’s strategic importance to the Empire, nor the richness of its cultures, as interesting to the British Government as they were to himself.

  The Prince of Wales, aged forty-eight, had become the Prince Regent, owing to the incapacity of his father King George III, a few months previously. He kept himself going on laudanum, alcohol, and the commissioning of improvements to Carlton House and the Brighton Pavilion. His biographer describes how in this very year, 1811, he was observed sitting at a table at Carlton House between his Secretary and his Secretary’s assistant, ‘the one placing a paper before him for his signature, the other drawing it away,’ and the Prince Regent neither knowing nor caring what they were. Lord Liverpool’s assurance that Lord Minto’s despatch had been ‘laid before His Royal Highness’ meant exactly that.

  On 11 September Lord Minto drove in state to Government House at Ryswick. The British takeover of Java was proclaimed in Dutch and English, and Raffles was proclaimed Lieutenant-Governor, subordinate to the Supreme Government in Bengal. Those Dutch gentlemen of the civil service who were to continue in their posts were named. Dutch laws were to remain in force provisionally, with modifications which included banning the torture or mutilation of criminals.

  Raffles, as Lieutenant-Governor, was empowered to introduce new regulations ‘to meet any emergency.’ But all new regulations must be ‘immediately reported to the Governor-General in Council in Bengal,’ disclosing any representations received against the proposed measures. Bengal would confirm or disallow the regulations ‘with the shortest possible delay.’

  Minto, in consultation with Raffles, laid down guidelines for the governance of Java. He was at pains to justify to London his decision, against instructions, to retain and occupy the island. ‘This is a much greater country than I believe is generally conceived,’ he wrote to the Secret Committee. Java should be made an English colony ‘as soon as we can, by the introduction of English colonists, English capital, and therefore of English interests,’ although the Dutch, resident over generations, should not be excluded. He flagged up essential changes in the inequitable system of tax-collecting which ‘will require considerable preparation.’ He had already suppressed the farming of gaming and cockfighting licences, and although the ‘monstrous system’ of slavery could not be eradicated all at once, he was banning further purchases of slaves.

  Minto and Raffles were aware that in the event of a peace with France, Java would almost certainly be returned to the Dutch. ‘All I fear is a general peace,’ wrote Minto. But this threat (to most Europeans, a hope), should not prevent the administration from ‘improving the condition of a people that has become tributary to our authority and tributary to our prosperity. All we are justified in avoiding is the prosecution in this interval of expensive works.’

  Reflecting on the uncertainty of England’s retention of the island, Lord Minto said: ‘While we are here let us do as much good as we can.’

  On 3 October 1811 Minto gave a dinner for General Sir Samuel Auchtermuty and the army officers. Auchtermuty proposed a toast which, he said, was never before possible – to Lord Minto, ‘Governor-General of all India.’ As Raffles wrote in triumph on 5 October to William Marsden, apprising him of his appointment as Lieutenant-Governor: ‘No man better than yourself can appreciate the value of this new acquisition to the British empire – it is in fact the other India.’

  Raffles gave a dinner and entertainment for Lord Minto, with fireworks, the day before he sailed for Calcutta. Raffles knew how to give a party. The avenue through the garden was illuminated, a temple at the end bearing the word ‘MINTO’. On each side of the avenue Chinese players performed musical burlesques. The dinner itself was distressing, with dissonance between those leaving Java and delighted to be going, and those remaining and less ebullient. Dutch ladies were invited, and Olivia and the Raffles sisters had been shipped over. During Lord Minto’s farewell speech, all the ladies present burst into tears. Captain Taylor, longing to see his wife and new baby in Bengal, was ‘never in higher spirits in my life…and away we went to our carriages like so many sky rockets.’

  Lieutenant-Governor Thomas Stamford Raffles, aged thirty-one, was on his own now, in charge – nominally – of a whole country, a little larger than England, with about the same population. Be careful what you wish for.

  Olivia wrote personally to Lord Minto at the end of January 1812. Her handwriting is neat and evenly spaced, as if copied from a draft, but her tone is emotional. ‘I am sadly deficient in words, and therefore can only assure you in the simple language of the heart that it throbs with affection as dear and as tender for you as ever a child’s did for a Father – you my Lord gave me a right to call you so, when at Malacca you desired me to consider myself as your Daughter, happy me …’ She hoped to see him once again in ‘your Country – this beautiful Java – everything here is beautiful! sweet enchanting!’ The conviction that
‘you, and you only have been the cause of our enjoying this sweet happiness adds infinitely to my content.’

  ‘Sweet happiness’ hardly described the challenges facing Raffles.

  The British had demonised Marshal Daendels. Minto, with uncharacteristic windiness, described him as ‘one of the monsters which the worst times of the French Revolution engendered…greedy, corrupt, and rascally in amassing money for himself.’ Daendels, by now far away fighting in Napoleon’s Russian campaign, was indeed a hard man, and a mean one. Hugh Hope, one of Raffles’ civil servants, told Captain Taylor that he had seen ‘a receipt of Daendels for the sum which he made Janssens pay for the fish in the pond at Buitenzorg, at so much a fish.’

  Yet his legacy was helpful to Raffles, who adopted and carried forward some of his projects. Daendels had, during his short administration, constructed with forced labour not only the excellent new military road, or post road, but other roads, bridges, barracks, hospitals and public buildings, of which Raffles’ cash-poor administration got the benefit.

  Raffles had the Java Government Gazette up and running at the end of February 1812, on the model of the Prince of Wales Island Gazette. The first issue announced that ‘Advertisements, Articles of Intelligence, Essays and Poetical Pieces’ would be accepted. It carried the Lieutenant-Governor’s General Orders and Proclamations (in English and Dutch), ship movements, marriages, births and deaths, extracts from the Calcutta Gazette and from Westminster debates – a mixture of parish pump and world news, the latter months out of date.

  The British Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, was assassinated in London in May 1812, not to be replaced (by Lord Liverpool) for a year – by which time news of the murder had just about reached Java. Hostilities had been ongoing for eight months already by the time the Gazette reported the outbreak of the 1812 war with America. Raffles did his bit by ordering a blockade on all American vessels.. Since the Americans purchased the preponderance of Javanese coffee, this hurt Java rather more than it hurt the Americans. Social events were reported in the Gazette with the customary jocular hyperbole. On 12 March 1812 there was a nocturnal ‘Pic-nic’ with dancing, attended by ‘all the beauty and fashion of the Metropolis of East-Insular India.’