Raffles

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by Victoria Glendinning


  The seizure Raffles suffered outside Thomas Murdoch’s house, and his subsequently impaired diction, were doubtless caused by a less catastrophic bleed. A modern neurosurgical review of Home’s autopsy, analysed in conjunction with descriptions of his symptoms, established a diagnosis of ‘cerebral arteriovenous malformation’. The usual form develops in early embryonic life. The rarer form is acquired in adult life, sometimes due to trauma or infections (such as tropical fevers). In addition to severe headaches, common symptoms are nausea and vomiting – which accounts for Sophia’s description of his attacks as ‘bilious’. Thickening of a portion of the skull is associated with the condition.

  The funeral was private, at St Mary’s Church, Hendon. Owing to the intransigence of the vicar, nothing marked the place where Sir Stamford Raffles was buried. By the end of the century, there was no one left who knew.

  In The Times of 1 March 1912 there appeared a notice from the vicar and churchwardens of St Mary’s intimating that ‘all persons interested in the remains of deceased persons interred within that portion of the churchyard adjacent to the south side of the church, proposed to be covered by the enlargement of the church, should apply for directions with regard to the reinterment of such remains.’ A question was asked in the House of Commons about Sir Stamford Raffles’ unmarked grave. The Straits Settlements Association contacted the vicar and the architect in charge in vain, because Raffles was not buried in the churchyard.

  In April 1914, when workmen were taking up the floor of the south chapel of St Mary’s, they uncovered a vault containing a single coffin. The wood had rotted, and a metal plate lay loose on the interior lead casing: ‘Sir Stamford Raffles Knt. Died 5th July 1826. Aged 46.’ (’46’ was not a mistake for ’45’, but followed an old convention of counting the date of one’s birth as one’s first birthday.)

  The vault was closed up again, and the new sanctuary was built above it. In 1920 the Association of British Malaya arranged for Raffles’ coat of arms to be carved on the stone floor immediately over the vault, with an inscription memorialising Sir Stamford Raffles as Lieutenant-Governor of Java and Founder of Singapore.

  Apart from the East India Company’s claim, Raffles left debts of around £6,000 – mainly unpaid bills relating to the furnishing of Lower Grosvenor Street and Highwood. Sophia applied to the Company, explaining that after the claims on the estate were met ‘there is little more than £10,000 to meet the demands of the East India Company.’ She offered to transfer to the Company monies deposited in Bengal, and Raffles’ India Stock, and a parcel of Consols, which would leave a balance of around £600 to make up the £10,000, to be made good ‘on the first realization of the estate.’ The Committee of Correspondence masticated the information, and recommended that the Court of Directors accept £10,000 ‘in satisfaction of all claims by the East India Company on the estate of Sir Stamford Raffles.’ The Court accepted the recommendation.

  Raffles’ death was not a public event. His fame was, initially, entirely due to Sophia. She was not only the keeper of the flame but the one who ignited it; and the curator not only of his collections, but of his memory and reputation.

  With unusual immediacy The Gentleman’s Magazine of July 1826 carried an obituary article (unsigned) of twenty close-printed quarto columns summarising his career positively and in detail. No reader could have been left in doubt as to Sir Stamford’s significance. Sophia surely had a hand in the drafting, even the writing of it. The article carries an account of the manner of his death, and quotations from his letters and reports, which could only have been supplied by her. A burst of triple exclamation marks, following a quoted piece of governmental cant, bears her stamp.

  Only a month after Raffles died, Sophia was planning a memoir of him. She assumed Cousin Thomas would take it on, and conceived it as a compilation, instructing him to seek contributions. At the end of the year Cousin Thomas confessed he just could not undertake the work, so Sophia faced up to doing it herself. Friends and colleagues let her use their own material and extracts from their correspondence with Raffles. But she lacked anything about his life before he went out to Penang – ‘the time is a perfect blank to me.’ Little survived on paper about his childhood, or his years in India House, or the circumstances of his first marriage – and although Cousin Thomas helped out with ‘early habits, character etc etc,’ Olivia remained ‘a perfect blank’ which he may not have dared to fill. At the same time, Sophia prepared a new edition of The History of Java.

  In April 1830 she was able to send Cousin Thomas a finished copy, bound in pink boards, of the Memoir of the Life and Public Services of Sir Stamford Raffles F.R.S Etc, Particularly in the Government of Java, 1811–1816, and of Bencoolen and its Dependencies, 1817–1824; with Details of the Commerce and Resources of the Eastern Archipelago, and Selections from his Correspondence, ‘By His Widow’. With 723 pages of text and another 100 pages of appendices, it incorporated not only correspondence but also many of Raffles’ voluminous reports, despatches, speeches, minutes, memos and extensive expository letters, lightened by linking passages by ‘the Editor’. The Quarterly reviewer was about right when he wrote, ‘On the whole, then, Sir Stamford Raffles is his own biographer.’

  A positive, twenty-page overview of the book appeared in the Edinburgh Review in July 1830. The (anonymous) author, Captain Basil Hall, indicated that ‘although it is not in human nature to suppose there should be perfect impartiality in such a case,’ the humanity and feeling in the book removed it from the ‘proverbially dull’ category of books on Indian subjects which engaged ‘none but the members of the Oriental Club.’ The Quarterly Review carried a long and eulogistic notice: the book was surely ‘a proud thing for the much-calumniated East India Company.’ There were doubtless men in India House and the Oriental Club shifting in their chairs and adjusting their estimate of Sir Stamford Raffles.

  When Raffles was in England in 1817, Francis Chantrey executed a marble bust of him. Chantrey was an extremely successful sculptor who ‘did’ all the great and the good – including, for St Paul’s Cathedral, Major-General Robert Rollo Gillespie. Chantrey’s original bust of Raffles went down with the Fame, but he had the plaster cast. Sophia commissioned several more – one for Cousin Thomas, one for the Zoological Society, another for the Singapore Institution. There survives Chantrey’s signed receipt to Lady Raffles for £1,500, dated 7 May 1833, for ‘a monumental statue of Sir Thos. Stamford Raffles in Westminster Abbey.’ This is a life-size seated figure in white marble on a tall inscribed plinth. It was through Chantrey, Sophia told Cousin Thomas, that she contrived to have the statue placed in Westminster Abbey.

  This statue is ‘among the private and public memorials to his greatness…if none of them existed, the name of Stamford Raffles could still never be removed from the list of England’s great statesmen.’ So wrote Demetrius Charles Boulger, whose Life of Sir Stamford Raffles was published in the ‘Makers of Empire’ series in 1897, at the height of a British Empire assembling its myths and marshalling its heroes. Sir Stamford Raffles took his place in the parade, his name more resonant than ever it was in his lifetime, an exemplar of much that was great about the Empire – and then, in the post-colonial period, of much that was wrong and bad. ‘Raffles’ became a projection – like a shadow-puppet.

  The materiality of him survives in a private collection – in a polka-dotted yellow silk waistcoat, thirty-seven inches round the chest, with a turn-up collar and embroidered trim, his dark sweat-stains under the arms. And a careful unwrapping of two folded papers reveals a handful of his hair – fine as a child’s, light bright brown with foxy glints, fresh and shining as if cut yesterday.

  Chapter 15

  What Happened to the Others?

  Maryanne’s husband William Flint died of dysentery on board the William Fairlie, bound for Canton, in 1828. He died intestate, leaving Maryanne in difficulties. She returned to Europe with her daughter Sophie, visited her two elder children in Ireland, and spent time in France wh
ere the living was cheap. Her younger son Charley, aged fourteen, went with Sophia and Ella to see her there: ‘Found mamma much better looking than I expected, and Sophie growing pretty and tall’ – but ‘shockingly spoilt by mamma.’

  Charley’s half-sister, Maryanne’s elder daughter Charlotte Raffles Drury Flint, brought up by the McLellands in Ireland, married in 1835 the Hon. Charles Knox, who became the fourth Earl Castle Stewart in 1857. A niece of Raffles’ old enemy William Robison, by coincidence, became the sister-in-law of Raffles’ niece Charlotte. As the Dowager Countess Castle Stewart, Charlotte died near Torquay in 1906 – the last person living who had known Thomas Stamford Raffles. Charlotte’s brother, Acheson, inherited Annaverna, the McLelland property in Ravensdale, Co. Louth and became a JP. He died in New Zealand in 1883.

  Sophia found lodgings for Maryanne, until she moved back to Cheltenham to live with Sophia’s widowed mother and Sophia’s unmarried sister Emily in 1831. Maryanne was ‘one of those gentle spirits that bends to all circumstances,’ Sophia wrote, and it was Sophia who, after strenuous efforts, managed to extract from Singapore the modest property of William Flint on behalf of Charley and Sophie. Mrs Hull died in 1836, and the following year Emily Hull and Maryanne Flint died within two days of each other, both ‘seized by spasms’.

  When in 1824 John Palmer was away from Calcutta, his partners took control of Palmer & Co. and curtailed the personal expenses he took from the firm. He could not adjust to commercial discipline. The East India Company declined to bail him out. Palmer & Co. survived until 1830 largely on the strength of his personality and social standing. He died in 1836.

  Thomas McQuoid tried his luck in Australia and became Sheriff of New South Wales in 1829. Money troubles continued to dog him and he took his own life in Sydney in 1841.

  Dr Thomas Horsfield lived in London from 1819, as Curator of the East India Company’s Museum, and then its Library, where he was visited by Alfred Russel Wallace, the future author of The Malay Archipelago and pioneer of the theory of natural selection. Horsfield’s collections survived, but his executors destroyed his papers. Unassuming and retiring, he never received the recognition he deserved. He died in 1859 aged eighty-six.

  Lieutenant-Colonel William Farquhar retired to Scotland, and lived at Early Bank Villa in Craigie on the outskirts of Perth – a large detached house with a gardener’s cottage and, across the lane at the back, a coach-house, stables and peach-house. In 1828, at the age of fifty-four, he married Isabella Loban, with whom he had five surviving children. His Eurasian children were provided for, as was their mother, and some of his grandchildren came to Scotland. He was promoted by reason of seniority to full Colonel in 1829 and to Major-General in 1837.

  Raffles’ treatment of Farquhar in Singapore, and the failure of his Memorial to the Company, never ceased to rankle. In 1825, a year before Raffles died, ‘the principal part of the gentlemen of the settlement’ in Singapore founded a ‘Raffles Club’ in honour of Sir Stamford as ‘founder of the settlement and as a lasting testimony to… the impulse and spirit created by his energy and activity during the short period of his residence here, to which is mainly to be ascribed its present flourishing and respectable appearance.’ The first annual dinner, ball and supper of the Raffles Club was held at the Singapore Hotel on 6 July, Sir Stamford’s birthday.

  Hearing of this, Farquhar wrote under the pseudonym ‘A Singaporean’ a letter to the Singapore Chronicle (founded by his son-in-law Francis Bernard, who in 1827 abandoned his wife Esther and left Singapore), which was reprinted in the Asiatic Journal. It was an error, wrote ‘A Singaporean’, to designate Sir Stamford as the founder of Singapore. It was ‘founded by the Supreme Government, at the representation of the Penang Government, acting on the suggestions of Lieut.Col. Farquhar.’ The latter had been authorised to proceed alone when ‘Sir Stamford altered his views’ and joined the expedition. The Carimons having been judged unsuitable, it was Captain Ross who advocated checking out Singapore. Sir Stamford’s ‘presence and agency’ at the momentous landing were ‘purely adventitious’. He was not ‘the sole founder of Singapore’.

  Farquhar could not evade the fact that the civil branch was senior to the military branch, but if the title of founder ‘can be claimed by subordinate officers, Lieut.Col F. had an equal claim.’ Military success, he wrote, was always attributed to the General of an army, not to the commanding officer of a division, so by analogy ‘the Marquess of Hastings is the real founder of Singapore.’

  When Farquhar read in 1830 the article in the Quarterly Review on Lady Raffles’ Memoir, he wrote to the Courier to protest against her attribution of the sole credit for establishing Singapore to her husband. Captain Basil Hall, the author of the review, snapped back in defence of Sir Stamford’s primacy in the matter. Farquhar published his own account in the Asiatic Journal later the same year, making a good case for claiming at least ‘a large share’ of the credit. After he died in 1839, the large stone mausoleum erected over his grave in Greyfriars burial ground in Perth carried an inscription detailing his thirty-three years in the service of the East India Company:

  Having in addition to his military duties

  served as resident in Malacca

  and afterwards at Singapore

  which later settlement he founded.

  That is unequivocal.

  The case of the Malayan Tapir represents another resentment Farquhar could have held against Raffles. Farquhar sent a drawing of it, plus a skeleton of its head and a detailed description, to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1816. But the drawing and his account were not published until five years later, in Paris, by Pierre Diard, the French naturalist who had seen the drawing and skeleton in Calcutta, and also a living specimen. He made generous acknowledgment to Farquhar, whose own account was published in 1821.

  Raffles wrote about the live Tapir he saw in Calcutta in the ‘Descriptive Catalogue’ of his Sumatran collection in the Transactions of the Linnean Society of London for 1821–3. He claimed with truth that he had first known the Tapir (just a head) in Penang back in 1805; he tried to block Farquhar’s 1821 paper by suggesting to Nathaniel Wallich that the Asiatic Society of Bengal might prefer to substitute his own account for Farquhar’s. Wallich did not pursue this.

  The rights and wrongs and anomalies, in Raffles’ lifetime, of discoveries, taxonomies, attributions and first publications of exotic beasts, birds, fishes and plants, are a subject for specialists. Ambition, vanity and competitiveness all played a part. So did the extreme slowness of communications and of translations, and the lack of a functioning international community of naturalists. Not all the creatures or plants bearing the tag rafflesi, rafflesii, rafflesia or rafflesiana may, strictly speaking, be correctly designated, and that is not always his fault.

  Farquhar’s collection of more than four hundred natural history drawings went to the Asiatic Society in London in his lifetime. In 1993 the Society sold them, and they were donated by the purchaser, Goh Geok Khim, to the National Heritage Board of Singapore. A selection, along with a portrait of William Farquhar, is on permanent display in the Singapore History Museum; and there is a fully illustrated descriptive catalogue in two volumes of what is now named the William Farquhar Collection of Natural History Drawings. As a naturalist, Farquhar has received his due in Singapore.

  But although ‘Stamford’ and ‘Raffles’ (not to mention ‘Flint’, ‘Napier’, and other familiar names), are remembered in streets, buildings and institutions, there is no memorial to William Farquhar and no Farquhar Street in Singapore. There was one, but it was insignificant and disappeared in redevelopment.

  Raffles’ own large and heterogeneous collection of natural history drawings form part of the Raffles Family Collection now in the British Library. Most but not all of them date from the brief period when he was in Bencoolen following the loss of around two thousand precious drawings and all the other treasures on the Fame. The surviving drawings have been finely reproduced, annotated and put in
context by Henry Noltie in Raffles’ Ark Redrawn.

  The ‘Minto Stone’, the tenth-century inscribed stele presented by Raffles to Lord Minto, was shipped back to Scotland when Minto left India – though he, dying on the way home, never placed it as he had fancied ‘on our Minto craigs’ or saw it in situ. The Minto mansion no longer stands, and its land is built on. The Stone is in the garden of a modern house. The inscription on the exposed side is badly weathered. Negotiations have been ongoing since 2003 for the return of the Stone to Jakarta.

  Lady Raffles, as she had always feared, remained financially responsible for Charles and Sophie Flint. She placed Sophie in a clergyman’s family in Blackheath. She vacated Highwood and let it out, then tried to sell it. Finding no takers, she decided in 1835 to go back and live there. Financial strictures forced her to give up her horses and carriage. Charles was boarding with an expensive tutor, preparing for entry to Trinity College, Cambridge. ‘He is not gifted with first rate talents – but I hope to see him a useful Minister of Christ,’ she told Cousin Thomas, to whom she remained close and with whom she shared family news and religious animadversions.

  Before returning to Highwood, travelling in Europe, she became a friend of Madame de Staël’s daughter-in-law Adèle, through whom she met Frances, the young wife of Baron de Bunsen, the Prussian Minister in Rome. The Baron and Baroness de Bunsen became her intimate friends and admirers, and later suggested living with her at Highwood and sharing expenses, a proposal which she declined. Her second edition of the Memoir (1835) was dedicated to Baron Bunsen.

  One can no longer refer to her as Sophia. She was Lady Raffles, ‘the former Queen of the East among her relics, and surrounded by the remains of her station… In the midst she moves so queenlike, and so humble, so serious and so spirited, so intelligent and so full of kindness.’ So she seemed to Frances de Bunsen. A visit to Highwood impressed upon this friend ‘the dignity, the order, the quiet activity, the calm cheerfulness with which Lady Raffles rules the house, the day, the conversation…’ Charles Flint’s son, Stamford Raffles Flint, remembered her from his boyhood: ‘Her tall and stately figure and quiet dignity are fixed in my mind.’ He was impressed by ‘the manner with which, after dinner was announced, she led the way alone into the dining-room.’ She did not designate any gentleman to take her arm and accompany her in, as was the convention. Stamford Raffles Flint recalled a watercolour portrait of Lady Raffles by George Richmond (its whereabouts now unknown), painted around 1850, which represented her just as he remembered.

 

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