Empress

by Miles Taylor

  At the same time as Victoria was becoming modelled at home as the epitome of genteel femininity, in India and China a completely different image – that of a warrior queen – was being stamped out with each military conquest. No British monarch before or since has been so indelibly linked to the representation of war in the colonial theatre. Ellenborough started something that proved impossible to stop. The two Sikh campaigns produced more medals. Now Wyon was in his stride, depicting not only Victoria (as ‘Regina’, rather than ‘Vindex’), but also the angel of victory in the first Sutlej medal, and, when that opportunity for peace with dignity had been missed, in the second Punjab medal, three years later, a mounted British officer was shown receiving the weaponry of the surrendering Sikh leaders.32 All of these medals were seen and approved by the queen. She also took the unusual step in 1848 of insisting that the official notice of the award of the Companion of the Bath to Major Herbert Edwardes, Company agent and hero of the siege of Multan in the second Sikh war, was announced before the Company gave their own medal to Edwardes.33 Nor were these new medals just a passing fancy. In 1851, a retrospective ‘Army of India’ medal was issued, its recipients the veterans of East India Company military and navy campaigns from 1799 to 1826.34 The past was being rewritten. Battles fought in India before Victoria was even born were now being commemorated in her name. How times had changed. On their return to government in 1846, the Whigs resented the chalice that had been passed on by Peel and Wellington. The 3rd Earl Grey, at the Colonial Office, complained to Hobhouse about awarding medals in the queen’s name, when the number of royal troops involved was relatively small.35 It was to no avail. In 1854 the ‘India General Service Medal’, with Victoria on one side and ‘Victory’ on the other, was established to cover all manner of minor campaigns in India.

  Loot from Lahore

  Medals were one thing, prizes of war another. Under Ellenborough’s successors as governor-general – Sir Henry Hardinge (1844–7) and Lord Dalhousie (1848–56) – Queen Victoria became more involved in Indian conquest. It started with the exchange of gifts and ended with the taking of war booty. In all this Hardinge and Dalhousie acted as her cheerleaders. Although not a man of the court, Hardinge grew close to the queen shortly after his appointment in 1844. She encouraged him to write to her often – which he did – and he sent on to her sketches drawn by his son Charles of events and personalities from the time, most of them recording the fall of the Sikh dynasty.36 Dalhousie was similarly attentive, enclosing private letters marked for the queen with his formal despatches, in particular sharing her confidence over the failures of his commander-in-chief, Hugh Gough.37 Queen Victoria pushed for honours for both governor-generals as swiftly as possible: Hardinge was made a knight commander of the Order of the Bath on going out to India, and elevated to the peerage within a few weeks of the conclusion of the war in the spring of 1846. Dalhousie arrived in India as a knight companion of the Order of the Thistle, and became a marquess within weeks of his military triumph in the early summer of 1849. In both cases, the queen was prominent in supporting her favourites.38

  In turn Hardinge and Dalhousie brought the queen around to their way of thinking about India’s northern frontiers. Across the nineteenth century there were few military minds more devoted than these two men to the doctrine of making India impregnable from the mouth of the Indus (modern-day Karachi) to the Malay peninsula. Hardinge used the two treaties which concluded the first Sikh war to leave the Sikh royal family intact (the boy-heir Duleep Singh on the throne, with his mother, the Maharani Jind Kaur acting as regent), but took over key forts and defences along the river borders with Afghanistan, and also turned Kashmir into a buffer state in the north-west ruled over by the Maharaja of Jammu. In July 1847 Hardinge boasted to the queen that ‘Your majesty’s Eastern Empire has this remarkable feature of unity & strength which renders it almost impenetrable against any external aggression,’ a cordon stretching, effectively, he stated, from Karachi to Singapore.39 Hardinge’s peace did not hold. The resistance of the Hindu ruler of Multan, the Dewan Mulraj Chopra, turned into a drawn-out second Sikh war, with the Afghanistan forces of Dost Mohammad Khan pitching in, and the British suffering heavy losses at the battle of Chillianwala in January 1849. A month later, the British won out at the battle of Gujrat. Without awaiting instruction from London, Dalhousie accepted Duleep Singh’s surrender, packed the boy maharaja and his mother off to exile and promptly annexed the whole of the Punjab. It was now, he told the queen, ‘a portion of your Majesty’s Empire in India’.40

  On the map next to Kashmir and the Punjab nestled the kingdom of Nepal. There were no fights to pick with the Nepalese. War between the Company and the Gurkha forces back in 1816 had left the two sides in accord. Besides, the Nepalese were busy bickering amongst themselves. In 1846 most of the court and government were slain in a coup, from which Jung Bahadur emerged as chief minister. He exiled the incumbent royals and placed the king’s son, Surendra Bikram Shah, on the throne. In 1850, Jung Bahadur decided to visit Europe. Despite widespread reports of blood on his hands, Dalhousie encouraged Queen Victoria to meet with him, arguing that it would be good for the fractious Nepalese to be shown the military might of Britain. Dalhousie provided an escort for the trip from Calcutta – Captain Orfeur Cavenagh.41 Jung Bahadur arrived in London via Paris, and, once doubts were allayed over whether he was who he said he was, he was given an audience with the queen, effectively her first official meeting with anyone from the Indian subcontinent. Jung Bahadur brought with him fifteen boxes of furs and armour, and, once the visit was concluded, elaborate arrangements were made for an exchange of portraits of the Nepalese royal family (or what was left of them), with those of Victoria and Albert.42

  Treasures and booty flowed most freely from the Punjab. Dalhousie sent back captured armoury, and the contents of the Lahore treasury, including its most lustrous jewel of all, the Koh-i-Noor diamond. The toing and froing of gifts with the Punjab had already begun under Ellenborough’s guidance in 1843, when silver plate was sent out from the queen to Sher Singh, who had thrust aside his nephew to become Maharaja of Lahore in 1841, only to be assassinated two years later. Inconveniently, the plate was already en route when Sher Singh died. In a spirit of economy, Lord Ripon suggested that the gift might be diverted to Mehmet Ali, the self-proclaimed Khedive of Egypt, and the queen approved.43 Soon, the traffic became one way. As part of the Treaty of Amritsar that settled the first Sikh war, the Maharaja of Jammu was required to send a quantity of Kashmir shawls over to the queen each year as a tribute. The East India Company intervened in this practice, stopped the transmission of shawls and changed the tribute to a simple cash remission. When Dalhousie found out, he reinstated the original practice, and so for the rest of the reign a parcel of shawls from Kashmir arrived every year at Windsor Castle.44 Booty from battle first arrived in 1847. Hardinge sent on to Windsor a battle-axe taken from the Emirs of Sindh, which was reputed to be the weapon of Nader Shah, the conqueror of Delhi in 1739. Doubts were cast over its authenticity. Its inscription was deemed by the orientalist scholar Horace Hayman Wilson to be Hindi not Persian. Nonetheless it still found its way into the royal residence – albeit in the toilet at Windsor.45

  More than anyone else, Dalhousie nurtured the queen’s appetite for trophies of war from the Sikh campaigns. In June 1848, the queen requested that Sikh cannon taken in 1846 at Aliwal and the Sutlej be sent to England, so that she might place them on the terrace at Windsor. To this consignment were added fourteen six-pounder guns. A year later she requested more. Additional cannon and guns – this time howitzers – were relatively straightforward, but the chain mail asked for from the battlefield proved harder to obtain. Eventually, suits of armour previously worn by Sher Singh and Dhian Singh (younger brother of the Maharaja of Jammu, assassinated in 1843 at the same time as Sher Singh) were sent, and in 1850 Duleep Singh gave a suit of armour to the queen as well.46 Then, on his own initiative, Dalhousie decided to make a present to the queen o
f Sikh regalia from the Lahore palace. There were two particularly choice items: the golden throne of Ranjit Singh, and the Koh-i-Noor diamond. The Koh-i-Noor had been wrung from the hands of one Indian dynasty after another since the fourteenth century, passing from Hindu rulers to Turkics to the Mughals, who fitted it into their peacock throne, and then on to Persian and Afghan raiders, finally coming into Sikh possession in 1830. Ranjit Singh’s throne was deemed too bulky to send immediately (it eventually arrived in London via Calcutta in 1853).47 The Koh-i-Noor was more portable, and Dalhousie took personal charge of it, transporting it all the way from Lahore to Bombay. Sewn into a small leather bag by his wife, and strapped around his midriff in a cashmere belt, the precious stone never left his body, even when he took his bath, as he dangled it over the rim to keep it dry. Duly delivered to the docks, the diamond then lay awaiting shipment for two months, finally reaching the queen at the beginning of July 1850. Her delight was evident. In 1849 she copied out into her journal Dalhousie’s letter announcing that the jewel, ‘a historical emblem of conquest’, was now hers, and on 3 July 1850 she took delivery of the gem in person at Buckingham Palace.48

  Having survived the passage from east to west, the Koh-i-Noor and the rest of the Lahore treasury faced a greater struggle through the choppy waters of protocol. The East India Company were aghast that the sovereign could receive such a large haul of war booty. This defied every rule developed over the years in dealings with Indian states and rulers. If the Koh-i-Noor was a gift exchanged on the termination of hostilities, then it had to be treated as though it was the accompaniment to a treaty. The diamond was therefore the property of the Company not the Crown, and it was the Company’s right to present it to the queen, which was precisely what Sir Archibald Galloway, chair of the East India Company, proposed. Hobhouse recognised the logic, for it was a classic Whig formulation, but on this occasion he out-manoeuvred Galloway and took the side of his governor-general and the queen. Hobhouse pointed out that the queen had never been a signatory in any treaty, and so the Koh-i-Noor could only be considered as war booty. Under international law, as war booty, its rightful destination was the sovereign head of state.49 And so the matter remained stalled as the spoils of war made their long journey west.

  Meanwhile a solution to this impasse came with the arrangements being made for the Exhibition of all Nations two years hence. A deal was struck between the Company and the Board of Control, with the consent of the queen, that the items from the Lahore treasury would be lent to the Exhibition by the Company – in whose possession they currently lay – before a selection of them was sold to the queen at the end of the Exhibition. They would be submitted as examples of the manufactured wares of India. The Company also promised to underwrite the costs of the Exhibition to the tune of £10,000, not an inconsequential sum.50 As we shall see, the Koh-i-Noor became the centrepiece of the 1851 exhibition; its appearance there was entirely fortuitous. It provided a short-term solution to the problem of who owned the booty from the Sikh wars. Later in 1851, a delegation from the Company visited the queen to hand over in person more than 100 items from the exhibition, including the heist from Lahore. Items of less value were purchased by the Crown and set on one side for the School of Design that was intended as a permanent legacy of the exhibition.51 In the end everyone was happy. The exhibition secured its main attraction, the Company kept face and gifted back to the Crown most of the disputed items of war booty, and the queen kept the Koh-i-Noor. Prince Albert sent it off to Amsterdam to be cut and polished, and in 1856 Franz Winterhalter depicted the queen wearing the gem in a brooch.52 The queen of diamonds had found its way onto the state robes of the Queen of India. To this day there is perhaps no more visible sign of the centrality of India to the British imperial imagination than the Koh-i-Noor, yet it did not end up on the royal breast by accident. From first to last, the queen herself sought out and made sure she hung onto the most symbolic trappings of conquest from her eastern dominion, from cannons to armour to jewels. The tables had been turned. The sovereignty over Indian civil and military affairs that for so long had been informally vested in the East India Company was now moving to the monarch. Ellenborough, Hardinge and Dalhousie – all were loyal Tories and one a devoted courtier. Yet throughout the Indian campaigns of the 1840s, in the background, it was the queen herself who proved the most covetous trophy hunter of all.

  Double Trouble

  By the time the loot from Lahore was handed over to the queen, pressure was growing for the Government of India to follow as well. Not to her in person, but to the Crown, that is to say the ministers acting on her behalf. In 1852, as the clock ticked down on the East India Company’s charter (it was subject to renewal every twenty years), a series of parliamentary select committees opened up British government in India to an unprecedented degree of inquiry and speculation.53 And, as Parliament gathered evidence about the operations of the Company in India over the previous two decades, some thoughtless gunboat diplomacy in Burma led to full-scale war there, and placed Lord Dalhousie’s policies under even more scrutiny. Lord Derby’s short-lived ministry set up the review of the Company’s work in India in April 1852. The double Government of India, which had survived almost seventy years, was now found wanting in so many ways. The parliamentary inquiry was both a review of what the Company had been charged to do since 1834, and an investigation of the viability of dual power. As an investigation of the dual authority, witness testimony showed again and again the confusion caused by the co-existence of crown and company. Questions were raised about the efficiency of having two distinct navies: the Royal Navy and the Company marine, about the very different cultures of command, discipline, promotion and reward in the royal European regiments and in the army of the Company.54 Concerns were expressed about to whom soldiers owed loyalty – the Company or the Crown?55 Finally, the existence of two jurisdictions of civil and criminal law in India – the queen’s courts and the sudder, or Company courts – baffled many in Parliament and angered petitioners from Calcutta and Bombay in particular.56

  War in Burma added to the troubles of those trying to defend the Company. By 1852 Dalhousie had earned a reputation that was increasingly for adding territory to British India and asking questions afterwards. The incident that triggered the war was a reprisal action by Commodore Lambert of the Royal Navy, who blockaded Rangoon in defence of ‘Her Britannic Majesty’s subjects’ when their property was seized. Company ships and troops were sent in to assist in the stand-off, which stepped up to full-scale war when the King of Ava refused to yield to British demands.57 Once victorious, Dalhousie took the decision to annex a portion of Burma – Pegu (Bago) – into British Indian territories. Back in Parliament the sequence of events in Burma raised a fundamental question: who had the power of recall? Namely, that if the Company had not wanted to support the governor-general in his annexation of Pegu, whose authority would have prevailed?58 It turned out to be a hypothetical question, for, as the Aberdeen coalition took up office, the annexation of Pegu was announced from Calcutta as a fait accompli, without any treaty negotiation, and in the name of the governor-general.

  Throughout the debates on the future Government of India, the queen was frequently invoked. Defenders of the Company admitted that a simple way to resolve the jurisdictional problems in the Indian courts would be to pool the judges from both systems and call them all the queen’s courts. The authority of the Company might be strengthened, argued George Campbell, by moving the seat of government to Agra, and by making all Indian people the subjects of the queen. The Company had become the focus of so much odium, argued another loyal servant, Marshman, that it would be as well to transfer the name of government to the Crown and improve reverence for authority that way. In terms of military morale, the discrediting of Company authority was having the same effect – let fidelity be declared to the queen instead, argued Henry Maddock.59 Other commentators went further and argued that authority should be exercised in the person of the monarch. For the fi
rst time in her reign, there were calls in public for Victoria to become the sovereign of India. John Sullivan, former Company official, suggested to Parliament that she be made in name what she was in reality, ‘the Queen of Hindostan or India’, and one of her sons be made viceroy.60 A fuller case was put a year later by James Silk Buckingham, sometime Indian newspaper editor and MP. No friend of the Company, which had thrown him out of India, he now returned the favour. In his Plan for the Government of India, he called for the queen to be proclaimed as sovereign of India, for the Crown to take over the debts of the Company, and for her rule in India to be characterised by acts of peace and improvements to public works.61 The germ of an idea that had been suggested in private by Lord Ellenborough back in 1843 now began to grow.

  In the end, Lord Aberdeen’s ministry avoided dealing with many of the issues brought up by the select committees. When Sir Charles Wood, the president of the Board of Control announced the new bill for the Government of India at the beginning of June 1853, there was no question of delay, as the Company’s charter only had eight months to run, and the session of Parliament only three. The queen made her own anxiety lest the bill be postponed known to Aberdeen.62 The bill left to one side reform of the courts, of administrative recruitment in India, and of the armed forces. Amongst other changes, the queen gained new powers over the choice of directors of the East India Company. Not only were they no longer allowed to canvass for election, but three of the eighteen directors were to be appointed directly by the queen. The queen also retained oversight over appointments in India, with new members of the Council there subject to her ‘approbation’. Whilst only a small shift of power, the 1853 legislation moved the Government of India further down the road towards the Crown. Some of the most doughty defenders of the Company realised its days were numbered.63