Raffles

by Victoria Glendinning

  Raffles’ Sophia was the second of their fifteen children. Mrs Hull was herself the youngest of twenty-one. These were fertile people. Sophia did the one great thing for Raffles that Olivia, for whatever reason, could not: she gave him children.

  Sophia’s father made money by private trading in Bombay, and in the year that she was born he brought his family home to Ireland. Then, he upped sticks and moved to England where, in 1815, one of Sophia’s younger sisters, Mary Jane, married Peter Auber, later Assistant Secretary to the East India Company – a connection which was to be useful to Raffles. In 1816 the Hull family moved to Cheltenham, precisely coinciding with the arrival of Raffles and his party. Another of Sophia’s sisters, Alice, married a young military man, Richard Zacharias Mudge, a few months after Sophia married Raffles. If the Hulls’ move to England was made with the idea of finding husbands for daughters, it proved effective.

  Chapter 9

  Sir Stamford Raffles

  England 1816–1817

  Cousin Thomas was slightly acquainted with two dissolute royal Dukes, and was elated by such encounters: ‘I can scarcely realise my present situation.’ Raffles trumped his cousin by becoming the friend of Princess Charlotte, the only child of the Prince Regent, and the presumptive heir after him to the throne of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

  In May 1816, aged twenty, she was married to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Raffles sent her six Javanese ponies and some of the tables and chairs which he had made in London from Amboyna burr timber from Java. Charlotte was delighted with the furniture, which she put in her new home – Claremont House in Surrey. A friendship developed between Raffles and the young royal couple.

  Princess Charlotte had been the problem child of dysfunctional parents. Her father, the Prince Regent, hated her mother, Princess Caroline of Brunswick. The pair separated after one year. He lived at Carlton House, she had her own establishment. Charlotte, shuttled between them, became a troubled teenager, loud-mouthed and gauche. She was, like both her parents, overweight, and profligate with money she did not have. She had a fling with a young Hussar, whom she met secretly at her mother’s house – with her mother’s connivance.

  At seventeen she was given her own establishment, Warwick House, tucked away across a courtyard from Carlton House. A strategic marriage was arranged with Prince William of Orange, son of William I of the Netherlands, but she refused to marry him. Another fling, with the King of Prussia’s nineteen-year-old nephew Prince Frederick, resulted in the Prince Regent crossing the courtyard to Warwick House in a rage and pronouncing she must live out of London in seclusion. Charlotte ran away down the back stairs of Warwick House and into a hackney cab. The unhappy girl was pursued, and immured at Cranbourne Lodge in Windsor Great Park. Her only permitted outings were to see her grandmother Queen Charlotte, wife of the demented George III.

  Among the European princelings hovering hopefully around the next-but-one heir to the British throne was Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the younger son of a minor dukedom in Thuringia. He made himself agreeable to the Prince Regent. He was not very royal, as European royalty went, and he had no money. He was lodging over a grocer’s shop in Marylebone High Street. But Charlotte made up her mind to marry him. It is said that when the Prince repeated the vow ‘With all my worldly wealth I thee endow’, the Princess laughed.

  Parliament voted the couple an ample income, plus a lump sum for setting up Camelford House on the corner of Oxford Street and Park Lane in London, and Claremont in Surrey. It was a popular marriage. Charlotte was cheered by the crowd whenever she drove out. People knew all about her misfortunes. Raffles, far away in Java, had known; the Java Government Gazette had reprinted scandalous articles from the London papers, and a special supplement, ‘The Princess Charlotte of Wales: The Dramatic Escape from Warwick House.’

  Nevertheless, the aspirational related to the royal family as if they were exemplars of integrity and the source of all blessings. Royal approval or disapproval could make or break a career. Raffles was well aware that his friendship with Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold, pleasant in itself, could be nothing but beneficial for his fame and prospects.

  On his visits to Claremont he found a happy couple – an animated young woman, and a well-informed young man with whom he could discuss politics. Visiting them at Claremont for the first time on 27 April 1817, he wrote from there to Cousin Thomas – knowing how much he would appreciate the letterhead – urging him to join him, Sophia and Maryanne on a continental holiday they were planning for the following month.

  Raffles was a success with the royals, striking the right note of respectful familiarity, not overstepping the mark. Queen Charlotte admired her granddaughter’s exotic furniture, and proposed paying Raffles a visit. He judged it more fitting to call upon her, and they met at the house of the Countess of Harcourt. He walked in the Countess’ park with the Queen of England on his arm, and she brought up the subject of the furniture. Raffles obliged by immediately diverting in her direction a pair of tables which had been earmarked for Sir Joseph Banks.

  A further instance of royal cupidity treasured by Cousin Thomas was when he, Raffles and Sophia were breakfasting at Berners Street and an equerry appeared, sent by the Prince Regent to taste the arrack from Java, which the Prince had heard was remarkably good. Raffles responded by taking all the arrack he had in the house round to Carlton House there and then. He told the Prince that he would supply him with arrack ‘as long as he lived to drink it’ – adding to Cousin Thomas, ‘If he drinks plentifully of it, as he is sure to do, it will not be long, for it is the strongest spirit in the world.’

  The Prince Regent had given Raffles gracious permission to dedicate The History of Java to him. Publication was scheduled for 10 May 1817, after which Raffles’ family party was due to leave for their tour of continental Europe. The group comprised Sophia’s best friend Ella Torriano, Sophia’s brother William Hull (who married Ella Torriano’s sister Jane), as well as Sophia, Maryanne, and Cousin Thomas. Both publication and tour were postponed when Raffles was commanded to attend a levee at Carlton House on 29 May.

  What happened there was probably thanks to Princess Charlotte. Cousin Thomas reported to his wife that the Prince Regent ‘marked [Raffles] out at the levee, entered into conversation with him, told him he had read a great part of the book, and most sincerely thanked him for the instruction and pleasure he had derived.’ The Prince also expressed ‘the high sense he entertained of the eminent services he had rendered to his country in the Government of Java,’ which, given the Company’s grudging attitude, can only have been music to Raffles’ ears.

  Raffles was invited to kneel. The Prince Regent then knighted him. ‘Why, Charlotte,’ said Prince Leopold in Raffles’ hearing, ‘they have made him a knight!’

  Tom Raffles was now Sir Stamford Raffles. But a mere knighthood was a disappointment. A baronetcy had been expected. ‘The honour of knighthood could not be very highly esteemed by him,’ opined Cousin Thomas, ‘when he had in his own establishment, a man of equal rank as his Body Physician.’ (Sevestre had been knighted for his services as surgeon at the capture of Cayenne in 1809.) Some thought that Raffles became ‘Sir Stamford’ and not ‘Sir Thomas’ in order to differentiate himself from Sir Thomas Sevestre. But he began using ‘Stamford’ even before moving from Cheltenham to London. It did sound more distinguished, but never caught on with his intimates. Sophia and the family always called him ‘Tom’.

  Three days after receiving his knighthood Raffles dined again at Claremont with Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold. When he was taking his leave next morning, Prince Leopold and Princess Charlotte – happily advanced in pregnancy – gave him a diamond ring. That is Cousin Thomas’ version. Sophia remembered the ring being presented on the day before they left London to sail back to the East. It doesn’t matter; the diamond was a fine one.

  Raffles had long dreamed of some ennoblement. Back in February 1809, in Penang, he wrote to Uncle Will
iam Raffles seeking information about an illustrious forebear, Sir Benjamin Raffles, who ‘about the time of James 1st or 2nd’ was created ‘Knight Banneret’. ‘Now as Knights Banneret were next to Barons in dignity as appears by Statute made in the fifth year of Richard II, Stat 2 Chap 4…and their heirs male are entitled to precedence and therefore the Title, it is of some importance to me to trace this more particularly – not that I am anxious at the moment to obtain the title, but I have reason to think that hereafter it may be of consequence.’

  The last time the mediaeval title ‘Knight Banneret’ was properly used was at the Battle of Edgehill in 1642. From the records, Raffles’ idea seems to be pure fantasy. The one significant Raffles from the past was John Raffles, in 1582 the mayor of Beverley in Yorkshire, where there are Raffleses recorded from earlier in the same century; in the mid-seventeenth century, there was a ‘Benjamin Raffels’ in Berwick-on-Tweed. None were knights, or knights banneret. Raffles wanted Uncle William to go to the ‘Herald’s Office’ and find out what he could ‘respecting the family of my grandfather and back from him to the date in which the glorious Knight Banneret Sir Benjamin strutted his hour.’ We do not know what Uncle William did about this, if anything.

  Sir Stamford Raffles, when he ‘strutted his hour’, put in for a coat of arms, through the normal channels. His petition to the Earl Marshall, the Duke of Norfolk, requested that the arms would bear ‘some allusion’ to services rendered ‘in the reduction and subsequent Government of Java.’ The letters patent, granting the arms, were issued on 2 October 1817.

  Raffles had further requirements. The design includes, awkwardly, two small oval medallions on a chain, one bearing Arabic characters and the other a kris – representing, as the official description has it, ‘a personal decoration (called the Order of the Golden Sword)’, conferred ‘by the Chief or King of Atcheen [sic] (a State in the Island of Sumatia [sic] in the Indian Ocean) as a mark of the High Regard of the said King and in testimony of the good understanding which had happily been established between that Prince and the British Government.’

  Raffles had his coat of arms, or its griffin crest, engraved in versions from large to minuscule on everything – on his book-plate, his forks and spoons, on gold and tortoiseshell boxes, on his chessboard and each of the chessmen, and on every single piece in a set of intricately carved Chinese ivory boxes containing mother-of-pearl and ivory counters for games. A fan of Sophia’s, with leaves of ivory tracery, opening into a full circle, has a tiny griffin on a central leaf; as does a fan of Maryanne’s, its tortoiseshell leaves so fine as to be transparent.

  He chose as the motto for his coat of arms ‘Auspicium Melioris Aevi’, which may be translated as ‘The hope (or token, or augury) of a better age’. Whether he knew it or not, the same motto was about to become that of the Order of St Michael and St George, an Order of Chivalry founded by the Prince Regent to celebrate the British acquisition of Malta. The coincidence is curious.

  The seven-week European tour began on 5 June 1817. They crossed the Channel from Brighton to Dieppe. The ladies had berths, and the gentlemen slept where they could, Raffles wrapped in a blanket on the cabin floor. At Dieppe they had to go the police office to obtain passports. Only Sir Stamford Raffles was examined, and every detail of his appearance noted down.

  They took in France, Savoy, Switzerland, Germany and Holland. Raffles rated punctuality highly among the virtues. Once, at Berners Street, Maryanne’s maid called out that her mistress was not ready when it was time to leave for dinner. Raffles, at the door, called back that she would have to come on by herself. On the tour Raffles, as team leader, made a ruling that ‘we should never keep the carriage waiting, but having fixed the hour of starting over night, should keep it exactly in the morning.’

  As he reported to William Marsden, they travelled through ‘Rouen, Paris, and Dijon, to Geneva; passed through the valley of Chamouni, along the foot of the Alps, and returned by Lausanne and Berne to Basle and down the Rhine to Cologne, whence we traversed the Low Countries to Brussels and Ostend.’ They stayed as long as a week only in Paris and Brussels.

  In Brussels, Raffles was presented at Court and met King William I (since 1815, the first King of the Netherlands), dining with him and his ministers, including G.K. van Hogendorp, and the Colonial Minister, Anton Falck. He wrote to Falck two days later appealing against injustice done to his good friend Jacob Cranssen, who was being ‘slighted’ by the new Dutch commissioners in Java. Cranssen was ‘advanced in life, and he cannot live in disgrace.’ A ‘more true Hollander’ never existed. Cranssen never considered, in joining the British administration, that he was acting against the interests of his own country. ‘England had been no enemy to Holland; she had gone to Java as a protecting power…’

  Both in print and in private, Raffles was vituperative about the Dutch in the Indies as inhumane colonial administrators and arch-rivals for market share. Individual Dutchmen, his former colleagues, were another matter. The view from London had corrected his tunnel vision. In the European scheme of things they were England’s crucial allies. ‘They were very communicative regarding their eastern colonies,’ Raffles told Marsden, ‘but I regret to say that, notwithstanding the King himself, and his leading minister, seem to mean well, they have too great a hankering after profit, and immediate profit, for any liberal system to thrive under them.’

  Raffles’ talent was never for making ‘immediate profit’. The King of the Netherlands assured Raffles that his system of cultivation would be continued, but stressed that ‘it was essential to confine the trade, and to make such regulations as would secure it and its profits exclusively to the mother-country.’ Raffles felt he had expressed his own opinions ‘very freely’ and, as they seemed to be taken in good part, ‘I am in hopes they may have had some weight.’

  Cousin Thomas made a book out of the travelogue letters he had sent home, which he published the following year with a dedication to ‘Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles Knt’. Cousin Thomas, on the evidence of his book, was not an open-minded traveller. He was shocked to the core by the streetwalkers soliciting in broad daylight in Paris and Brussels, and declined to visit any place connected with the ‘pestilential’ and ‘diabolical’ Voltaire, or the ‘blasphemous’ and ‘depraved’ Rousseau.

  Raffles kept no journal and did not even write, as he had promised, to the Duchess of Somerset until he was in Brussels on the way home. He felt there was nothing he could tell that was new to her – ‘what can you expect from one who knows so little of the European world, and is scarce in one place before he flies to another.’ The Duchess had been everywhere. To attempt descriptions of the Rhine or of Belgium ‘would be like giving you an account of the banks of the Thames or the fields of England.’

  Much of what Raffles made of Europe therefore remains opaque. What he did think worth writing to the Duchess about was French farming. Against all current theories of agriculture, which favoured large enclosures and fewer proprietors, he liked ‘the smallness of the properties, and the inclusion of the fruit-trees in the grain and hay-fields’:

  Now when I see every man cultivating his own field, I cannot but think him happier far than when he is cultivating the field of another… Throw the people out of these little properties and they lose their independence of character, their pride, and when only accustomed to daily wages are soon fitted for the army, the manufactory, or the poorhouse… I like to see fruit-trees growing among the corn, because it not only affords a refreshing and beautiful scenery, but because it reminds me of those patriarchal times, those days of simplicity, when the son and the grandson, and even the great-grandson, honoured the trees that their father planted.

  Subsistence farming is backbreaking and chancy, and Raffles’ evocation of ‘those days of simplicity’ is romantic and aesthetic; the Raffleses were within living memory townspeople. But he is consistent here. His pastoral vision of every man working his own land and having control over its products relates to what he had wanted for
the Javanese.

  The best moment for the tourists was their first sight of Mont Blanc. Cousin Thomas was moved to write a poem. Raffles was eloquent on the subject to the Duchess: ‘That troubled sea which seems to have been in a moment stayed and fettered by an icy hand, still shines in all its majesty; nor has all the vice or all the blood which has stained the lower world, cast one spot to sully the heavenly purity of Mont Blanc.’

  Switzerland had been annexed by revolutionary France, a desecration to which Raffles is obliquely referring. Mont Blanc, as the ‘stupendous Mountain’, was the focus of Coleridge’s 1802 poem ‘Hymn before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni’. (Coleridge never actually went there.) Shelley and Mary Godwin, with Clair Clairmont, had made an almost identical journey to Raffles’ across Europe the previous summer. The Shelleys subsequently published a History of a Six Week Tour, the climax of which was Shelley’s ‘Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni’:

  Mont Blanc yet gleams on high – the power is there

  The still and solemn power of many sights,

  And many sounds, and much of life and death.

  Raffles’ conception of the ‘heavenly purity of Mont Blanc’ post-dated Shelley’s poem, but he could not have read it when he wrote to the Duchess in July 1817, since it was not published until that November. Nor could he have read Byron’s Don Juan, in which Mont Blanc is ‘the monarch of mountains’, as it was not yet written; nor yet the sixth book of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, already written but not published until long afterwards: