by Miles Taylor
Charlotte Canning also encouraged Victoria to seek visual representations of India. She passed on news of the work in India of two photographers, Dr John Murray and Felice Beato, who were amongst the first to record the aftermath of the fighting. Editions of both photographers’ work were later purchased for the queen, but it was Charlotte who initially brought them to her attention, describing in particular detail Beato’s views of Lucknow.35 Victoria took her own initiative as well. At the beginning of February 1858 she commissioned the Swedish court painter Egron Lundgren to go to India to depict the battle scenes. Lundgren reached India in time to witness the final stages of the British campaign. Amongst other works, he recreated the relief of Lucknow, providing rough sketches which were then turned into book illustrations and an oil painting by Thomas Jones Barker.36 In 1859, Charlotte Canning added to Victoria’s Indian portfolio by sending on her own watercolours and ink drawings. Many of these were of picturesque scenes – ancient buildings and landscape views – but battlefields were included as well, notably depictions of Farrukhabad, Kanpur and Lucknow.37 Such sources as these suggest that Victoria was more familiar than most with the topography of the Indian rebellion. Taken together, the work of Murray, Beato and Charlotte Canning presented to Queen Victoria an eastern sublime ravaged by war – beautifully ornate mosques and palaces stockpiled with armoury, disempowered colonial buildings pockmarked with cannon-fire and bullet holes, loyal over-dressed sepoy regiments resting battle-weary in arid settings. These were dissonant images, neither glorifying nor sentimentalising the aftermath of the revolt, but displaying the chaos and disorder wrought by war.
The Transfer of Power
By October 1857 it was becoming clear that the future Government of India would not lie in the dual authority of the East India Company and the queen’s ministers. Or, as Lord Palmerston informed Queen Victoria in his own colourful way, there would be an end to:
the inconvenience of administering the Govt of a vast country on the other side of the Globe by means of two Cabinets, the one responsible to your Majesty & to Parliament, the other only responsible to a mob of Holders of Indian stock, assembled for 3 or 4 hours, 3 or 4 times a year.38
Palmerston’s government began the work of drafting a bill which would transfer power to the Crown, or rather to the ministers of the Crown, who would be subject to the usual constitutional checks and balances provided by Parliament. Opinion in the press and amongst Indian experts was divided.39 A growing crescendo of voices called for the Crown to displace the Company and become the sole authority in India. ‘The veil which has hitherto concealed the Crown from the eyes of the people of India’, declared John Henry Treemenheere, ‘must now be rent asunder.’ A ‘virtual sovereign’, the Crown would drive forward the moral reform of India, some writers argued, as they called for European colonisation and conversion of the subcontinent under the queen as empress.40 Here lay a simple logic. What better way to Anglicise India in the aftermath of the rebellion than to invest power in the queen?
Curiously, the Crown and its powers remained imprecisely defined as Indian constitutional reform was considered during the winter of 1857–8. Both government and opposition understood the ‘Crown’ to imply greater ministerial control over the Government of India, or simply over the Company itself. Palmerston’s Cabinet got as far as drafting a bill that would have substituted the Company and the Board of Control with a small council in Britain chosen by nomination. Palmerston was also advised to move the seat of British government from Calcutta to Agra, and to take steps to put an end ‘to the prevailing indifference of our rulers to Christian truth’. All of this, Palmerston explained to the queen, would mean more power exercised in her name.41 She was uncertain. Reading over the clauses set out in Palmerston’s initial bill at the end of January, 1858, Queen Victoria enquired, ‘Is this absolute power?’ Her own take was unequivocal. She expected to be given more direct responsibility for India, including sight of all despatches to and from India, just as she was entitled to see all Foreign Office despatches. She sought a unified command under the Crown of the Indian army. She also wished to retain complete control of the patronage and appointments within the Indian civil service as well as the Indian military.42 Absolutely.
Palmerston and his colleagues resigned in February 1858. To Lord Derby’s Cabinet now fell the task of reforming the Government of India. Charged with transferring power in India from Company to Crown, Derby and his ministers also wanted to hang on to power at Westminster. Derby’s was an unstable majority. Having defeated one ministry, a headstrong House of Commons was capable of despatching its successor, and it was anticipated that the new government’s India bill would provide the earliest opportunity for a showdown. Hence the Conservative bill conceded an elective element to the new Council, doubling its size and giving some of Britain’s largest urban constituencies the right to choose Council members, much to the queen’s consternation. An early version of this bill also pandered to other popular demands, including evangelical pressure. The executive remit of the governor-general was extended, and a new bishopric at Agra was promised. A clause contributed by Prince Albert committed the new Government of India to other ‘public works’ in addition to railways. The new elective element pacified the Commons (just as it enraged Victoria).43 Nonetheless, the Conservatives managed to embroil themselves in a crisis six weeks later. A despatch from Lord Ellenborough, Conservative president of the Board of Control, had carried garbled versions of Governor-General Canning’s Awadh proclamation of March 1858, itself designed to penalise landholders who were still holding out against the British. The despatch was leaked to politicians outside the Cabinet and then exploited by both sides of the debate, namely those MPs who felt that Canning was not harsh enough on the rebels, and those who felt the Awadhis had some cause to complain.44
Almost no reputation emerged untarnished from the furore over this infamous ‘Oude proclamation’. Ellenborough resigned, Canning – ‘too “civil” by half’ as Punch caricatured him – felt misunderstood and Derby limped through the next few weeks fearing that his government would fall. No reputation, that is, save that of Queen Victoria. For it was the queen who refused to allow Derby to dissolve Parliament and so bring on the fourth change of government in three years. She chided her prime minister for not having shown her the offending despatch before it was sent to India. When Derby, having reshuffled his son, Lord Stanley, to be president of the Board of Control for the last two months of that office, chose the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton as Stanley’s replacement, Queen Victoria objected.45 Whilst Parliament continued to work out what elements of the royal prerogative might be entered into the new India bill, here was the queen acting out some of its principal features: the right in future to see all despatches to India, and the right to be consulted on Cabinet appointments. Moreover, with the confusion over Canning’s policy in India and the political disarray at home, Queen Victoria began to emerge as a solution to the problem of authority in the aftermath of the Indian revolt. As the Conservatives’ India bill neared the end of its long journey through the Commons with its seventy-one clauses more or less agreed – the Company’s powers to be transferred to a secretary of state, advised by a Council comprising fifteen members, with a viceroy appointed by the Crown – MPs began to talk up a new role for Queen Victoria in giving moral force to the change of government. Leading the cheers as ever was Disraeli, who suggested to the queen that the bill was ‘only the ante-chamber of an imperial palace’ and that her name should now be impressed upon Indian native life. But radicals joined in as well. John Bright called for a proclamation to be made in the name of Victoria and to include an amnesty, the upholding of native property titles and adopted heirs, and a statement on religious toleration.46
Still Queen Victoria was not satisfied. In the bill that left the Commons at the beginning of July she was ‘shocked to find that in several important respects the Govt have surrendered the Prerogatives of the Crown’. Without her agreement alteratio
ns had been made to key clauses. Competitive examination was now proposed for the Indian civil service, and Parliament was to be given the final say in the raising of the Indian army. The queen conveyed her horror to Derby, for it was ‘to him as the Head of the Govt that she looks for the protection of those Prerogatives which form an integral part of the Constitution’. Somewhat conciliated by Derby’s promise to uphold Crown influence in the Indian army, the queen relented, and the bill passed through the Lords.47 There it survived a late rally by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who, whilst respecting that there could be no more proselytism or interference with Indian religion, insisted that the Government of India should not be indifferent to the question of conversion to Christianity. It should declare against caste, make the Bible compulsory in schools, end state support for Hindu and Muslim festivals and stop discrimination against native converts. Derby offered some reassurance but not much. A cleric proved easier to brush aside than a queen. One final royal touch was required to the second clause of the act: all previous powers of the East India Company would now be exercised not ‘on behalf’ as in the draft but instead ‘by and in the Name of Her Majesty’ and it was duly promulgated on 2 August.48
Queen Victoria pulled off a remarkable achievement with the Government of India Act. Since her accession, politicians had clipped her constitutional wings on virtually all domestic matters. By the 1850s the idea that the royal prerogative was no more than a useful fiction had become a commonplace to the extent that when Walter Bagehot described the monarchy a few years later as the ‘theatrical’ element in the English constitution, few disagreed.49 Victoria’s influence over the bills transferring power from the Company to the Crown belies her reputation as a constitutional monarch with limited powers. Throughout the discussions in Cabinet and the debates in Parliament she sought clarification on every point that touched on her role. She also kept the politicians to the task in hand, not letting either the change of government in February or the crisis over the ‘Oude’ proclamation in May slow the momentum behind Indian reform. Victoria’s stance on several key components of the clauses proved of crucial significance. Her insistence that any elective element in the new Council be balanced with a nominated equivalent, her requirement that she see all Indian despatches, and her refusal to relinquish all military patronage indicate a fuller interpretation of royal prerogative than is usually understood; but these key clauses also reveal her distrust of parliamentary management of India, especially over troop numbers – a factor she believed lay behind the vulnerability of the army in 1857. They pointed to a future in which the monarch played more and not less of a role in Indian affairs. The Government of India Act passed, despatches began to arrive at Windsor by the cartload, and Victoria and Albert immediately returned to their obsession with reforming the Indian army. Her work done, the royal couple left for Potsdam in Prussia, to join Princess Victoria, newly pregnant with their first grandchild, the baby who would become the ill-fated heir to the Prussian empire (Wilhelm, the future Kaiser). From Potsdam Victoria applied the finishing touches to the transfer of power in her own dominion. As time would tell, the last strokes were by far the most important.
The Indian Magna Carta
The new Government of India was made in England, but needed to be proclaimed in India. Lord Derby and his Cabinet colleagues now turned to draft a proclamation. Derby recognised that it was important that it should be said in the words of the queen. Insofar as the proclamation reiterated what had been agreed in Parliament, it was reasonably straightforward. The Crown was to assume direct authority from the East India Company, the governor-general was to become a viceroy, all existing treaties with native rulers were to be accepted, employment in the public service was to be open to Europeans and natives alike, equal and impartial protection was to be given to all subjects in the exercise of religion and in the maintenance of property rights, and there would be an amnesty. The principle of religious neutrality continued to present problems. The queen’s official title included the phrase ‘Defender of the Faith’ and Derby’s Cabinet colleagues wanted to retain this wording. At the same time, explicit recognition of the monarch’s Christian religion sat awkwardly in a document which promised not to ‘undermine any native credo or customs, or to propagate any form of religious beliefs’. As one minister observed, this phrasing ‘if it speaks the Queen’s mind, it represents her to India as indifferent to Religious truth, whereas all that is required is that she should be impartial’. He went on:
[s]he subscribes to the S.P.G. the very object of which is here condemned, and is, and cannot but be a Christian Queen . . . We had agreed to found a bishopric at Agra, and we must either do that, or permit others to do it, & from time to time found other Bishoprics; but the language . . . would seem to preclude the Queen from that exercise of her Prerogative.50
A way around this obstacle was to emphasise how the queen’s devotion to Christianity made her tolerant of other religions.
Thus far had Lord Derby reached when he met with the queen on 9 August to update her on the eve of her departure for Germany.51 At the same time a new crisis began to brew over the references to religion in the proclamation. Whilst Derby was carefully consulting on how to encompass both Christianity and the religions of India in the same text, Lord Stanley received a deputation of British missionary societies, stated to them that religious neutrality would guide future policy in India, and that no steps would be taken in India to give to ‘the opinions of Europe in apparent preference to those which were found existing in the country’. Disraeli reported to Stanley that these words – relayed as Stanley referring to Christianity as ‘the religion of Europe’ – had caused considerable dissatisfaction, and one that was not confined to ‘the ultra-religious circles’. Disraeli went on: ‘[No] Government can stand that is supposed to slight the religious feelings of the country. It is as important to touch the feelings and sympathies of the religious classes in England as to conciliate the Natives of India.’52 Lord Derby and his Cabinet faced an obvious dilemma: how to appease evangelical opinion at home and at the same time offer meaningful words of pacification in India. They were also obliged to give voice to the queen throughout the proclamation. As Spencer Walpole reminded Stanley just before the draft was sent on to Prussia, ‘the Indian proclamation is likely to be one of the most important State Papers ever issued by the Ministers of the Crown’, its tone needed to be high, and throughout references to the British government should be replaced with the queen, ‘partly for the purpose of acting, as it were, upon an oriental imagination, – and partly for the purpose of convincing the people that the transfer was something real and complete’. Not so important as all that: Derby carelessly left his copy of the draft behind in London when he left town.53 Fortunately, Lord Malmesbury, the foreign secretary, was more careful, and, as part of the royal party in Potsdam, he was deputed to show the draft proclamation to the queen. She did not like what she read.
Anticipating Queen Victoria’s reactions was never easy, as many nineteenth-century prime ministers found to their cost. She told Malmesbury immediately that the proclamation ‘must be almost entirely remodelled’. It was a question of substance and one of tone. She wished all references to the British government to be substituted by the royal ‘we’. She suggested (as Derby had assumed she would) that the way around the religious neutrality issue was to say that the deep attachment she felt for her own religion meant she would not interfere with the religion of the Indian people. She wanted a greater commitment stated to ‘future prosperity and general welfare’ than the vague reference in the draft to the ‘relief of poverty’, and she wanted something said about the privileges of subjects of the British Crown whilst at the same time making a guarantee to preserve ancient laws and usages. Above all Queen Victoria wanted the proclamation to rise to the occasion of what she called ‘the commencement of her new reign’.54 Or, as Malmesbury told Derby, ‘[T]here is not half bellows enough in it for the personal address of a Great Queen to an Or
iental Hemisphere’ – in its present form it was ‘too much like a respectable magistrate’s notice after a parochial [meeting]’. Malmesbury, who found Victoria ‘the most fidgety person I ever saw within the reach of a Minister’, then conveyed her instructions for the proclamation to Lord Derby:
The Queen would be very glad if Lord Derby would write it himself in his excellent language, bearing in mind that it is a female Sovereign who speaks to more than 100 millions of Eastern People on assuming the direct Government over them after a bloody civil war giving them pledges which her future reign is to redeem & explaining the principles of her Govt. Such a document should breathe feelings of Generosity, Benevolence, and Religious feeling, pointing out the privileges which the Indians will receive in being placed on an equality with the subjects of the British Crown & the prosperity following in the train of civilisation.55
Two things then happened, or rather did not happen. First, Lord Derby replied to acknowledge receipt of the queen’s revisions, but revealed that the draft had already gone to the printers so he could not check it against the suggested changes from Potsdam, although he assured Malmesbury that he had avoided all the points to which Victoria had taken exception. He and Stanley, as well as George Clerk (now the new permanent under-secretary), had moved on to another thorny topic: how the proclamation, and in particular the phrase ‘Defender of the Faith’, would translate into the Indian vernacular. Derby hoped, somewhat unrealistically, that it might come out benignly as ‘Protectress of Religion’.56 Secondly, learning no doubt from Stanley’s candour on meeting the missionary delegation earlier in the month, the Cabinet went quiet on the final text contained in the proclamation. Until news reached London at the beginning of December that the transfer of power had been proclaimed throughout India on 1 November, no one was any the wiser outside of the Cabinet and the court as to what it actually said. Those in the know gave little away. In a speech at the Mansion House in early November, Derby stated that a ‘message of peace and mercy’ had been sent out from the queen to her Indian empire, whilst the Duke of Argyll told a meeting of the India Christian Association in London later that month that the proclamation was limited in its scope, and simply removed the ‘screen’ between the Company and the Crown.57 Evangelical natures clearly abhorred the vacuum. As late as October the missionary lobby assumed that the assumption of power by the queen would accelerate not diminish the spread of Christianity. For example, Lord Shaftesbury claimed in a speech at Leeds in October that even without government aid ‘clouds upon clouds’ of Bibles could descend on India.58 Seldom can a document of such magnitude have been kept under wraps for so long and caused such speculation.