Read Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress Online
Authors: Jan Morris
The British found the Red Fort abandoned. Only a few dour and fatalist sentries remained at their posts, asking for no quarter, and getting none. Anybody else found in the building was killed too as a matter of course, and that night the British commander ordered his dinner to be served among the exquisite arabesques of the Diwan-i-Khas. There was no sign of the King, but presently intelligence arrived that he was hiding with a ragged mass of followers in the tomb of his sixteenth-century predecessor Humayun, a vast
mausoleum, domed and minareted, which lay within its own gardens some miles east of the palace—almost a town in itself, court opening into court, and one of the noblest Moghul monuments in Delhi.
The intelligence chief of the Delhi force was Hodson, and to him fell the task of arresting the King of Delhi. Since we last met him in the Punjab Hodson had been accused of unjust treatment of native princes, and had been pronounced unfit for political office. He was more than ever a bitter and resentful man, his ferocity sharpened, his taste for vengeance heightened, his contempt for Indians sourer than ever. He was nevertheless given carte blanche to deal with the royal family as he thought fit, except that he must spare the life of the king, whom the British proposal to try for treason.
Off to the tomb of Humayun Hodson rode, with fifty of his own wild troopers, slashed about with cummerbunds and sabres, bearded, turbanned, booted, like a savage praetorian guard of the Raj—galloping heedless through the crowds of refugees who poured out of Delhi with their carts and bullock-wagons, and who cringed into the gutters as this terrible squadron swept by. The force halted in the open square outside the gate of the shrine, and sending an emissary inside to demand Bahadur’s surrender, Hodson awaited the supreme moment of his life. One can almost see him now in the great dusty square, half an Englishman, half a Sikh, dusty, lithe, ardent, dressed in the haphazard flamboyance dear to irregular cavalrymen down the centuries, the son of the Archdeacon of Lichfield awaiting the submission of the last of the Moghuls. A small crowd had gathered in the morning heat, waiting there silent and expectant around the horsemen, and presently there emerged from the shrine a palanquin, born by four servants. Inside lay Bahadur, gaunt and exhausted, his long beard straggled upon his chest.
Hodson promised him his life, with the proviso that if any attempt were made to rescue the king on the way back to Delhi, Bahadur would be shot like a dog. Then the little procession moved off along the road to the city, the crowd following silently behind, and gradually thinning out as they approached the British sentries at the Lahore Gate. The city was almost deserted. Through the Chandni Chouk bazaar they passed in silence, the troopers reining in their horses: and at the Red Fort Hodson handed over to the
civil power the Light of the World, who was promptly locked up in a dingy little house within the walls—where, sitting cross-legged upon a verandah, listlessly cooled by frayed peacock-feather fans, and sometimes shrieked at by harridan wives from behind their shabby screens, he offered for many months one of the favourite sight-seeing experiences of Delhi.
Next day Hodson went back to the tomb of Humayun to arrest two of the royal princes still sheltering there. To them he promised nothing. On the way back to Delhi he ordered them out of their cart, had them stripped to their loincloths, and borrowing a carbine from one of his soldiers, shot them both dead with his own hand. Watched by a vast crowd of Indians, he took the bodies into the city and had them thrown upon the ground in front of the police station: and there they remained until, their stink becoming unbearable, they were buried in the cause of sanitation.
1
1
For instance he thought, wrongly as it proved, that in time of necessity-he could turn himself into a house-fly.
1
How merciful was the Great Ruler of all worlds, wrote General Sir Garnet Wolseley in retrospect, to end the Crimean War before allowing the Indian Mutiny to begin—‘we should have manfully faced the double misfortune, but it must have very seriously strained our resources’. As it was, many regiments came direct from one campaign to the other, feeling less than grateful, one may imagine, to the Great Ruler.
1
He was one of the few British officers to fear the worst, and perhaps his instinct was hereditary: his great-uncle was Lord Gough, conqueror of the Sikhs, his father was a Bengal civil servant, his elder brother was an officer of the 8th Bengal Cavalry, and he himself was to spend forty more years in the Indian Army, before dying in 1909 as Keeper of the Crown Jewels.
1
Though as a poet he generally was, so
The
Times
correspondent W. H. Russell reported severely to his readers, ‘rather erotic and warm in his choice of subject’.
1
And she died herself on July 15.
1
The last of them, General Sir Mowbray Thomson, survived until 1917 and was the most reliable eye-witness of the tragedy. Who opened fire first, the British or the Indians, and whether the Nana deliberately planned the massacre, we shall never know.
2
It is all remembered in Cawnpore (nowadays spelt Kanpur). The fatal ghat, where the temple still stands on its bluff, is still called Massacre Ghat, and on the site of Wheeler’s entrenchment there is a huge and awful memorial church, with a slab commemorating the ‘15 officers, 448 men, 3 officers’ wives, 43 soldiers’ wives and 55 children’ who died. The massacre well, however, in the centre of the modern city, has sensibly been obliterated by the Indians since their independence, the British having covered it with a mourning angel of white marble. I wish I could say that a hush of elegy still hung over Cawnpore, but in fact it is a flourishing textile city, and in 1971 I was shown around its grim historical sites in a spirit of distinctly cheerful detachment. As for the Nana, he disappeared into myth, and nobody knows when or how he died.
1
He survived this calamity too, dying comfortably on his estate in Scotland 15 years later.
1
The 9th, with whom I had the pleasure of serving nearly a century later, so distinguished themselves in the Mutiny that they ever afterwards called themselves the Delhi Spearmen: 14 of their officers and men won V.C.s in the campaign, including Private Goat.
2
Havelock died almost at the moment of success, and was promptly beatified by his fellow-fundamentalists—soon after his death a kind of Holy Tablet was issued in his name, each commandment opening with the dread words HAVELOCK SPEAKS … (and he says, for example, that Whatever A Man’s Professional Calling, He Ought to Aim Evangelically At Doing Good). Outram, ‘the Bayard of India’, died in 1863, and is one of the few British administrators still commemorated by a statue on the Maidan at Calcutta: there is also an effigy of him on the Thames Embankment, puzzling to that overwhelming majority of Londoners who have never heard of him. The ruins of the Residency‚ which were to be immortalized by Tennyson in heroic verse, are preserved to this day by the Indian Government, with diligent respect.
1
Where his tomb remains, in a garden across the road.
1
Hodson himself was killed during the relief of Lucknow in 1858: his estate was valued at
£
170, not counting the horses, and his regiment survived the Raj as the 10th Bengal Lancers (Hodson’s Horse). The King of Delhi was tried in his own Diwan-i-Khas for rebellion and complicity in murder: described by prosecuting counsel as a ‘shrivelled impersonation of malignity’, he was sentenced to life imprisonment and exiled with his nagging wives to Rangoon, where he died in 1862.
S
WEPT away with the carnage of the Indian Mutiny were the last dilettante deposits of England’s eighteenth century empire. There had been a pagan, or at least agnostic charm to that old sovereignty—short on convictions, rich in gusto and a sense of fun—but there would be little that was airy or entertaining to the new empire emerging from the shambles of Lucknow and Cawnpore. It knew its values now, stern, efficient and improving, and it recognized as its principal duty the imposition of British standards upon the black, brown and yellow peoples. The Mutiny had demonstrated indeed that not all the coloured peoples were capable of spiritual redemption, as had earlier been supposed, but at worst the British could always concentrate on material regeneration—the enforcement of law and order, the distribution of scientific progress and the lubrication of trade.
Almost the first possession to feel the impact of these certainties was, as it happened, the most allegorically pagan of them all. Since the end of the French wars the seven Ionian Islands had been ruled by the British. Tossed from the Venetian Empire to the French, and momentarily to the Turks and the Russians, in 1815 they had been made a British Protectorate. The British had wanted them because of their strategic position. Not only did they stand on the fringe of Islam—just across the Corfu Channel the Muslim world began, in the high mysterious hills of Turkish Albania—but they also covered the entrance to the Adriatic Sea, and stood protectively beside
imperial routes to the east.
1
Corfu, the principal island of the group, was fortified as a naval base, while the other islands of the archipelago each received its small imperial garrison. British administrators, mostly Army officers, established a government for the islands, and a constitution was devised which, while satisfying some of the forms of liberal enlightenment, in fact left every jot of power satisfactorily in imperial hands. The flag of the Septinsular Union included the colours of all the constituent islands, but dominantly in the middle was the British royal standard.
For half a century the Ionians remained a military station and a popular place of resort. A succession of notable individualists sailed out from Britain to rule the islands, giving the Union a peculiar distinction in the annals of Empire. They were often cast in the older imperial mould, honouring values of a lost magnificence and working in lordly disregard of cable or Parliamentary motion. For such men the Ionian Islands, one of which was Homer’s Ithaca, offered a vividly figurative background. Theirs was an age much influenced by Byron’s version of classical romanticism, and they often found themselves symbolically at home among the gods, shrines and legends of the Hellenic world, as they moved from gaol inspection to rood works, petty session to pay parade, through the wine-dark sea.
In October 1858 a British naval cutter, bright as buttons and heavily ensigned, sailed up the narrow channel to Gaios, on the island of Paxos a few miles from Corfu: past the little island of the Madonna, where British redcoats now lived in the barracks the Venetians had built; past the British Residency on the waterfront, gabled, arched, balconied and terraced in a kind of Venetian Georgian; until, its sailors handily jumping ashore with their boathooks, it moored alongside the minuscule piazza of Gaios. This was as pretty a Greek island square as one could wish—copybook Ionian, scrubbed and whitewashed, with a terraced hillside rising above, and the little side-streets of the town winding invitingly out of sight. In the
centre stood a church, with seats outside for meditative clerics; on the corner was a tavern, with chairs for policemen and fisherfolk to sit back-to-front upon. In this square, legend said, Antony and Cleopatra dined on the night before the battle of Actium, and clustered there that morning was a distinctly theatrical committee of dignitaries. The British Resident was there, in the cocked hat and epaulettes of his office; and the officers of the little garrison; and all the local aristocracy, part Greek, part Venetian, swarthy and pomaded; and grandest of all, the heavily bearded Greek Orthodox Bishop of Paxos, in his full canonicals of high black hat, episcopal staff and dangling silver cross.
The gangplank was thrown ashore, and from the cutter there emerged, eyes ablaze with interest and resolution, William Ewart Gladstone, aged 48, already one of the most famous of Englishmen, and now visiting Paxos as Special Commissioner to the Ionian Islands. He had been sent by the Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, to report upon the future of the islands—whether they should remain British, as the British would clearly prefer, or whether they should unite with the newly independent Greece, as most of the islanders apparently now wished. Out of office himself, a passionate philhellene and a distinguished Homeric scholar, Gladstone had arrived in Corfu on board HMS
Terrible
, had been saluted with guns, had inspected guards of honour and done all kinds of things not normally to his taste: and though the British in the islands almost universally detested him, and the Greeks generally disappointed him by not being sufficiently Homeric, still he had enjoyed himself, visiting six of the seven islands and making several learned and incomprehensible speeches in the Assembly at Corfu.
Now, at the end of the year, he had come to Paxos, the representative of the mightiest of empires visiting one of its least significant wards. Among the British administrators of the Septinsular Union, that old spirit of swashbuckle tenuously survived even now, and Gladstone came among them like an emissary of a new and graver order. His very purpose there was unprecedented, for this was the first time Victoria’s empire had seriously considered a voluntary abdication of sovereignty. Off the gangplank stepped Mr Gladstone, forward stepped the Lord Bishop of Paxos, and there
occurred the best-known moment in the whole history of the British in the Ionians.
Mr Gladstone took the bishop’s hand and reverently kissed it, remaining with his head silently bowed expecting to be blessed. The Bishop was taken aback. He did not know what to do. He had certainly never blessed an Anglican statesman before, and was perhaps unsure whether it would be liturgically proper. There was an awkward pause. The Resident of Paxos, the commander of the garrison and other Britons watched with amusement from the sidelines—having indeed, as one of them wrote, ‘considerable difficulty in maintaining the gravity befitting so solemn an occasion’. The Bishop hesitated; the statesman waited; and then, reaching opposite decisions at the same instant, the one bent down to bestow his blessing, the other straightened himself to stand.
They collided: and the barely perceptible laugh that arose from the British bystanders was a last laugh from the old empire—a chuckle from the adventurers and the nabobs, the freelance rulers of Punjab or Sarawak, the fur traders of Norway House, the heedless Anglo-Irish and the plantation princes of Jamaica.
Before we progress ourselves into the High Victorian, let us spend a few pages in the Ionians, for they were in many ways the most delectable of all the imperial islands. For most of their time in the Ionians the British remained absolute autocrats.
1
There was a Senate and a Legislative Assembly in Corfu, and perfunctory gestures of democracy were made in all the other islands—from north to south Paxos, Levkas, Ithaca, Cephalonia, Zante and the distant Kythera, south of the Morea. Real power, though, was firmly in the hands of the British Residents, and of their superior officer the Lord High Commissioner in Corfu, whose salary in the 1830s was the
same as that of the President of the United States, or 2⅓rd of the entire Ionian public revenue, and who was known as ‘the Lord High’ to the respectful, ‘the Lord Mighty’ to the impertinent, ‘
il Lordo Alto
’ to the Italianate Ionian gentry, and to the Greek peasants as the Harmost, the ancient title of Spartan colonial governors. At first the islanders did not much care, having an immense respect for the nation that had defeated Napoleon. Later the loyalty faltered, and the general feeling became overwhelmingly in favour of union with Greece—‘
Enosis
’.
The British slightly liberalized the system with a new constitution in 1848, but mostly continued to think that they knew best. Few of them spoke Greek or Italian, the twin languages of the Ionians, and they ruled with a bluff disregard of local aspirations—‘keeping all classes’, as D. T. Ansted wrote in an angry critique, ‘in the condition of children, so that they are not much more fitted to conduct their own affairs now than they were half a century ago’. There was no malice to this despotism. The British did not wish to oppress the inhabitants, they just wanted no trouble. As usual they built good roads, laid on fresh drinking-water, and made useful objects like lighthouses, lock-ups and lunatic asylums. They improved the quality of justice. They relieved the condition of the Jews, who had been confined to ghettos in the Venetian way. They kept order, most of the time, in a region that was traditionally among the most turbulent in the Mediterranean (though since no local man would do the job for them, they were obliged to hire an executioner from Albania, who used to arrive from across the Corfu Channel wearing a parti-coloured costume like a jester, and a face mask). They also introduced the potato, which old-school Greek Orthodox clerics promptly denounced as the original Eve’s apple.
But few of them thought much of Ulysses’ successors. ‘The constant use of garlic,’ wrote one administrator, ‘and the rare use of soap, impress an Englishman very disagreeably,’ while another observed that the modern Greek habit of reducing everything to pecuniary standards ‘makes Homer, Plato and Co. creditors for a large capital.’ The Orthodox religion of the islanders would surely make them, if the pinch ever came, pro-Russian, and in the meantime they never seemed to go to sleep. ‘Oh
what
have I done,’ one
Englishman was overheard groaning to himself on his balcony one night, vainly trying to sleep through the shattering street noises below, ‘what
have
I done that Her Majesty should banish me to this vile and abominable place?’
So they ran their petty bailiwicks with a tight-lipped self-reliance, as they might have organized Madrasis or Baluchis long before. It was a source not so much of chagrin as of astonishment to them that the Ionians were prepared to exchange the security of imperial rule for the hideous uncertainties of
Enosis
: or as Lord Kirkwall phrased it, ‘it is of course mortifying to the pride of Englishmen that the Ionians should prefer to be united to poor, weak and distracted Greece, to remaining under the protection of strong, wealthy and well-governed England’. The Ionians were a lively and intelligent people, but their temper was more Levantine than Attic, and to Britons of the day they must have cried out for firm and incorruptible command.
Some remarkable imperialists had done their time in the Ionians during the half century, and their memories were by no means forgotten in Mr Gladstone’s day. Charles Napier, for instance, had left an ineradicable mark upon Cephalonia, one of the rowdiest of the islands. He adored the place. ‘Cephalonia is never out of my mind or my heart’, he wrote years later. ‘They say
first
love is the truest, and Cephalonia is mine.’ Nor was he speaking figuratively, for his illegitimate descendants still lived on the island, having inherited a small plot of land he had acquired in Argostoli. At a time when most of his colleagues despised the islanders, Napier stood stoutly. by them. ‘I like their fun, their good humour, their paddy ways, for they are very like Irishmen.’ He learnt Greek and Italian, he made many local friends, and he governed the island with the help of the best of the local gentry (the others reminded him of the worst sort of Irish absentee landlord), fiercely resenting all outside interference. Napier scoffed at constitutional advance, but worked like a slave building highways, founding schools, dredging harbours, planting forests, conveying water, starting experimental farms and repressing corruption.
All over Cephalonia his artifacts remained. There was his neat little stone lighthouse on the Argostoli point, designed for him by his friend John Kennedy, a neighbour in County Limerick (cost exclusive of lantern
£
117). There was his handsome prison building, to the very latest circular design, on the quayside at Listori. His water conduits still supplied the people of Argostoli, and everywhere the influence of his idiosyncrasies survived. Since his day the British had put down several awkward insurrections in Cephalonia, but they never abandoned the style he bequeathed to them there. In the little British cemetery at Argostoli, over the harbour causeway, was buried a Captain John Parker, who had been murdered during an affray in 1849. Parker’s little dog, having failed to drive off his assailants, stayed gamely beside his master’s body, attacking anyone who approached: and when they buried the young officer, upon the top of his tomb the British, in a truly Naperian touch, placed an admiring effigy of his pet—crouching, bristly and always awake.
1
In the 1820s Lord Guilford had come to the Ionians. He had hit upon the idea of founding a university there, for he was a devoted hellenist, rich, and was shocked that modern young Greeks had no university to go to at all. He thought first of establishing it on Ithaca, the home of Ulysses himself, but unfortunately that island was virtually inaccessible, practically waterless and almost uninhabited, so he plumped for Corfu instead. It was a good second best. Not only was it the Corcyra of the ancients, but it was also the place where Lord Guilford himself, in 1791, had been received into the Greek Orthodox Church. For this civilized man, Eton and Christ Church, and a son of the Lord North who had lost the American empire, was a genuine cosmopolitan. De Quincey once called him ‘a semi-delirious
Lord’, but he spoke six languages, wrote poems in classical Greek, and was a Fellow of the Royal Society. He had been the first British Governor of Ceylon, a post he found uncomfortably beyond even his varied capacities, and ever since the British acquisition of the Ionians he had devoted his energies to the idea of the university.