by Miles Taylor
Once in Calcutta Ellenborough lost no time in taking the unusual step of writing to Victoria separately on all matters connected to Indian affairs. This was unprecedented. Previously, governors-general had sent their official despatches and confidential correspondence to the East India Company Court of Directors and to the president of the Board of Control, who then used his discretion in passing on information to the monarch. Ellenborough broke with that protocol, sending a monthly résumé of the latest news in India directly to the queen.64 In so doing, he started up a convention that was followed by nearly all of his successors. For Ellenborough, this was more than a simple courtesy. He envisioned a special position for the British monarch in India. As he explained to Victoria, during his first durbar tour in 1843: ‘were your Majesty to become the nominal Head of the Empire . . . [t]he princes and chiefs would be proud of their position as the Feudatories of an Empress’. He went on, explaining that if the princes were given reason to feel ‘confidence in the intentions of their Sovereign’, they would co-operate in the improvement of their dominions and the lives of their subjects. Finishing with a flourish, he told Victoria that he could ‘see no limit to the future Prosperity of India’ if it were governed with careful regard for the ‘interests of the People . . . and not the pecuniary advantages of the Nation of Strangers to which Providence has committed the rule of this distant Empire’.65 This was a truly remarkable letter. Ellenborough put the idea of ‘empress’ into the young queen’s mind, over thirty years before it became her official title. Such audacity. For the direct assumption of power over India by the Crown ran counter in every respect to the past eighty years of British intervention in India. How far could Ellenborough take the queen and her ministers with him on this new course?
CHAPTER 2
WARRIOR QUEEN
The first vessel anywhere in the world to bear the new queen’s name was the wooden sloop steamship Victoria, which slipped out of the Bombay dockyard in 1839. For the next fourteen years it plied an unspectacular passage back and forth to Aden and Suez, shuttling passengers, as well as the mail.1 The main action lay not in the Indian Ocean but to the north and east. Between 1842 and 1853 the British Empire in Asia grew like never before – into Sindh and the Punjab (part of what is modern-day Pakistan), into coastal China and down into Lower Burma (nowadays the Irrawaddy delta region of Myanmar). It was probably the bloodiest decade of small colonial wars of Queen Victoria’s reign, and the armed forces of the East India Company, both navy and troops, led the way.2
HMS Victoria escaped the fray, but the queen did not. From being a mere cipher in Indian affairs under the Whigs, Victoria became more directly associated with the burgeoning Empire from the early 1840s onwards. As Walter Arnstein has argued, her role as a ‘warrior queen’ was at least as important as her public identity as a young mother and wife. Now treaties were signed off in her name – most famously, the Treaty of Waitangi, establishing the new Crown colony of New Zealand, but also others in Asia and the Arabian Gulf. Her signature replaced that of the East India Company in treaties such as those with Muscat (1839) and Aden (1843), and the Treaty of Nanking (1842) which opened up Chinese ports to British traders and annexed the territory of Hong Kong island.3
Such changes did not simply reflect a difference of legal nomenclature, they also demonstrated increasing interest in the affairs of Empire, on the part of Victoria and Albert. With her domestic ministers reluctant to endorse a more martial monarchy – Sir Robert Peel quashed the proposal for a new military order to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Wales4 – the queen turned to India. Here the influence of Lord Ellenborough was decisive. In his short governor-generalship of 1842–4, Ellenborough did more to upset the East India Company than anyone in his position before or after. Victoria took Ellenborough’s side, and her views on the paramountcy of the Crown over the Company began to harden. Limited by convention as to what she could say publicly, her resolve took shape over the issue of campaign medals for all the victories in India and China during this period, as she insisted they be struck and awarded in her name. It was the beginning of a new royal style in India. As the Punjab kingdom fell, the symbols of rule transferred to her, as the story of the famous Koh-i-Noor diamond describes. By the time the charter of the Company was renewed for what turned out to be the final time in 1853, pressures in India and in Britain had moved control further in the direction of the Crown.
The Runaway Elephant
Vain and headstrong were just two of the more polite comments made about Lord Ellenborough, who left London at the end of October 1841 for Calcutta to replace Lord Auckland as governor-general. He departed bragging to the queen that ‘we shall be in possession of the Emperor of China’s Palace’ by her birthday, and within a few months he was able to boast of reversing the unremitting bad news of the campaign in Afghanistan.5 Victory at Jellalabad in April 1842 meant that British forces could retreat from Afghanistan with hostages saved and some dignity preserved, after both sides of the conflict suffered great losses. The British forces exacted heavy retribution as they looted and burnt their way back over the border.6 Further east it was clear by the spring that the combined forces of the Royal Navy and the East India Company navy were winning out in China. Captured Chinese flags were sent by the War Office to Buckingham Palace, to the evident pleasure of the queen.7
In his first year in India Ellenborough thus brought to an end two campaigns: the wars in Afghanistan and China. The pressure to open up the Chinese trade was an Indian as much as a Chinese question, insofar as the ending of the Company’s monopoly in 1833 led to the growth of an overseas trading community in China. The opium trade, a legal enterprise, was spearheaded by merchant houses operating out of the ports of Gujarat and Bombay. Some of the most vocal agitators for free trade with China were the merchants of Bombay, who had also been effusive in their congratulations at the accession and marriage of the new queen.8 For their part, Victoria and Albert identified with their new Chinese acquisition. Albert suggested their eldest child be known as Princess Victoria of Hong Kong. At the end of November, delighted at the news of the Treaty of Nanking, Victoria cut out from the newspaper its formal announcement, including the clause that Hong Kong was to be ‘perpetually ceded to her Britannic Majesty’, and placed it in her private journal.9
Ellenborough was not simply tying up loose ends. He was determined to leave his stamp on India.10 He took personal command of the final stages of the exit from Afghanistan, and then proceeded to rule by proclamation. In the first of these official pronouncements, confirming the end of hostilities in Afghanistan, Ellenborough made public his criticism of Lord Auckland, upholding the principle of non-interference in neighbouring sovereign states. This was supplemented by a circular sent to the rulers of Nepal, Hyderabad, Nagpur, Awadh and elsewhere, describing the recapture of Ghazni and Kabul in Afghanistan, and the treaty with China ‘dictated by the queen’, and warning them to preserve tranquillity in their own states.11 At the end of 1842 he held a durbar at Ferezepore, on the banks of the Sutlej, so that Dost Mohammad Khan, the Afghan Emir held prisoner by the British since 1839, could pay homage to him before returning to Kabul.12 Ellenborough also sent in the Bombay army to mop up lingering rebel activity amongst the Emirs of Sindh, who remained defiant of the truce in Afghanistan. In Sindh, ignoring expert advice, Ellenborough gave Charles Napier carte blanche to turn a mission of control into one of conquest. By the following March, the Emirs had been defeated in decisive battles at Miani (Meeanee) and at Hyderabad, and the province was subjugated. The region bounded by the Indus river was added to British control, a territorial gain to which Ellenborough added a showy flourish of free trade by proclaiming the abolition of all the riverine custom duties and tolls. Napier made sure that the queen’s birthday in this newest acquisition of the colonial Empire was marked with full military salutes.13
To cap it all, in an extraordinary act of theatre, Ellenborough authorised the removal of the sacred sandalwood gates of the mausoleum of
Sultan Mahmud at Ghazni and their restoration to the temple at Somanath in Gujarat. In his proclamation of 16 November he set out the route that the escort of the gates would take across the Punjab. Justified as restitution due to the Hindus of India, whose shrine had been looted eight centuries previously, Ellenborough made what turned out to be his biggest mistake. The gates were known to be replicas. Muslims in India protested, whilst the English-language press in Calcutta and Bombay launched into the governor-general for interfering in religion, and appearing to support idolatry.14 Back in Britain Ellenborough opened himself up for criticism and ridicule all round. The pre-eminent cartoonist of the day, ‘H.B.’ (John Doyle) cast him as an elephant running mad.15 Old India hands castigated him for his ungentlemanly attack on Lord Auckland, and for not leaving military leadership to the generals. The Times accused him of an ‘apish affectation of Orientalism’.16 Early in 1843, Parliament reassembled, as news of the Somanath and Sindh proclamations was being reported. Ellenborough was quickly exposed as the government’s Achilles heel, his governing style roundly condemned. Zealous Anglican MPs, led by Robert Harry Inglis, laid into his decision to use the forces and resources of the British government in India to support Hindu ‘idol-worship’. Peel defended his errant governor-general as best he could, whilst expressing in private his own misgivings.17 Over the annexation of Sindh the opposition proved more resilient, and it took a careful doctoring of the blue books to turn Napier’s aggressive invasion into an act of necessity caused by the warring Emirs.18 Sindh turned out to be the trap into which the elephantine Ellenborough finally fell. Within a year, the East India Company had successfully sought his recall, and his successor – his brother-in-law Sir Henry Hardinge, secretary at war in Peel’s Cabinet – was sent out to undo the damage.
One person stood by Ellenborough throughout these turbulent two years: Queen Victoria. She had become close to Lord Auckland’s successor in India. Apart from a six-month gap in 1843, Ellenborough wrote directly to the queen every month, enclosing copies of each of his infamous proclamations. During the same period she heard first-hand from Peel as soon as news came in from India. From the Board of Control Lord Fitzgerald furnished further private information, for example sending extracts from Lady Sale’s journal of captivity in Kabul long before the book became available publicly. And Lord Stanley corresponded regularly from the War Office about the China campaign.19 Where the Whigs had let Indian news only drip through to the palace, with the Conservatives it was in full flow. Some of it was dirty water. Plenty of politicians, including Peel and his foreign secretary, Lord Aberdeen, pointed out to her Ellenborough’s faults. However, she warmed to his policies in several ways. When he issued medals in her name for the victorious troops of the Afghan and Chinese campaigns, she recorded her support, only wishing that she had herself sent the order. In the summer of 1843 she asked Peel to include in the upcoming queen’s speech, which would open the new session of Parliament, ‘something relative to the new Possession of Sindh’. Peel deflected her, reminding her that the Court of Directors of the East India Company believed the annexation of Sindh to be ‘untenable’. Victoria persisted nonetheless, stating her intention to send public letters of support to both Ellenborough and Napier. Out came the rule book. Peel reiterated that ‘the regular and constitutional channel for conveying the opinion of your Majesty . . . would be through your Majesty’s servants’. Still the queen did not desist. When it became clear that Ellenborough was to be recalled, she expressed her view that this was ‘very unwise’ and also a ‘very ungrateful return for the eminent services Lord Ellenborough has rendered to the Company in India’. She concluded ominously, ‘[t]he Queen would not be sorry if these gentlemen knew that this is her opinion.’20
Queen Victoria’s admiration for Ellenborough had limits. On the one hand, as she confided to her journal as Parliament tore his policies apart, ‘I must say that with the exception of the Samnauth Proclamation, & an occasional want of judgement [he] has done a great deal.’ Equally, when she and Albert finally spent time with Ellenborough on his return from India, he ‘did not impress either of us very favourably’, coming over for all his intelligence as conceited and contemptuous of others.21 It was the principle that Ellenborough stood for in India that attracted Victoria. The manner of his fall from power led her to talk with Peel ‘of the very bad system, on which the whole of the Indian possessions are managed. The East India C. have a negative Power, which is quite absurd, & prevents everything going on well.’ Peel agreed, suggesting that the present arrangements could not survive, and that it would all end ‘in the Crown having the management of the whole’. Just over two weeks later, Peel proposed a solution which would mean that the Company ‘should not appear to triumph over the Crown by naming their own Governor’. Henry Hardinge would go out as both governor-general and commander-in-chief of the Army, an act which, Peel explained, would be ‘recognised as my appointment by sending out one of my own Ministers’, and moreover one who had sanctioned Ellenborough’s policies.22 The triumph of Peel over the Company did not spell the end of the dual government. The fundamental difference between wielding the power of the Crown and yielding power to the Crown remained. However, an important line had been crossed. Peel was the first minister to put into Victoria’s head the idea of direct rule by the Crown over the Indian subcontinent. Hardinge, Ellenborough’s successor, now became the first governor-general to put the queen’s head on the medals and awards symbolising the new British presence in the north-west of India.
The Queen’s Army
Issuing victory medals to East India Company forces in the queen’s name was one of Lord Ellenborough’s more impulsive pronouncements. Ellenborough’s order broke with protocol in several ways, as members of Peel’s Cabinet observed on hearing the news.23 Such an award, it was argued, should have been issued by the queen, campaign medals in India were not generally given to both Company and royal troops, and there was a reluctance to single out some regiments for distinction from the swathe of forces who fought without special honour. However, Ellenborough wanted to cover the Crown in the laurels of victory. He had already suggested that the cavalry regiment which led the line earlier in the year at Jellalabad – the 15th Hussars – be renamed Prince Albert’s Own.24 Now he wanted to draw in the queen as well. She was supportive, naturally enough, and the Duke of Wellington stepped in to reassure his colleagues in early December.25 So William Wyon at the Royal Mint was instructed to come up with an appropriate medal.
Wyon faced a challenge. Not in depicting Victoria, whom he had been drawing since she was fifteen, and whose bust he had already engraved for the first coinage in domestic circulation of her reign; the dilemma was that monarchs did not normally feature on British war medals. There was one famous exception proving the rule, and that was the prince regent (admittedly a monarch-in-waiting) wearing a laurel on the ‘Waterloo medal’, given to all soldiers – officers and men – who served on the victorious battlefield in June 1815.26 Otherwise, monarchs were invoked at times of conciliation or peace, as George III had been on the ‘peace medal’ distributed amongst Native American tribes during the war of 1812.27 In India, until 1842, monarchs never appeared at all. Between 1778 and 1839, eleven different campaign medals were struck for the native and European regiments in India, as tokens of their success in battles on the Indian subcontinent from Gujarat to Mysore, but also further afield in Egypt (1801), Java (1811), Mauritius (1811), Nepal (1814) and Burma (1824). Initially, Britannia and the British flag were depicted, before a more settled image emerged of the sepoy soldier, his foot holding down an enemy troop. Inscriptions detailing the battle were in English and Persian. Sometimes, a little more imagination was applied. The Burma medal of 1824–6, for instance, depicted an elephant crouching before the British lion. But there was not much in the pattern book for Wyon to go on. Ellenborough clearly could not wait and a simple medal was approved from Simla for the soldiers who served under General Nott in the retreat, showing the mural of a cro
wn, with the date of the battle of Jellalabad added.28
Wyon’s Afghan medal was sent out in 1843. It used the standard bust of the queen already in circulation on domestic coin, added the motto ‘Victoria Vindex’ and left room on the obverse for the name and date of the battle, to which Kandahar, Kabul and Ghazni were added.29 In September 1843, a similar medal was struck for those who served in the Sindh campaign. This marked a true turning point – ‘the first opportunity’, cooed the Bombay Times, ‘on which special permission has been given to the Company’s troops to wear, in any portion of Her Majesty’s dominions, decorations won in India’.30 Wyon’s China medal took another year to complete. His original design pulled no punches, depicting the British lion pinning down the Chinese dragon, an image that particularly pleased Prince Albert, who preferred it to the alternative of ‘a composition representing the signature of the treaty’. Albert noted drily, ‘modern acts of Diplomacy are rarely happy subjects for artistical representation’. In the end diplomatic etiquette won the day – lions and dragons were rejected as too provocative, and the royal coat of arms with a faux palm tree in the background was chosen for the medal instead. Something of the martial was retained: the motto read ‘Armis Exoposcere Pacem’ (‘they demanded peace by force of arms’).31