The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (11 page)

Cornwallis, nevertheless, certainly treated the Indians with respect. A large part of his job was diplomatic (he sent the first Englishman to Tibet). British India at the time was centered on Calcutta, and much of the subcontinent remained in the hands of a variety of rajahs, the residual Mughal empire, the Mahrattas, and others. Cornwallis managed to keep the English peace with one significant exception, when he was called upon to unsheathe his sword against the sultan of Mysore, who was invading neighboring states (and who would eventually be overthrown by Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington). In these campaigns, Cornwallis proved a master of tactics and logistics (he was the first English commander to see that elephants were the perfect transport animals for artillery) and brought as allies the Mahrattas and the Nizam of Hyderabad. It is, incidentally, a myth that the eighteenth-century English had a huge technological advantage over their Indian adversaries. In fact, the troops of the sultan of Mysore were at least as well equipped, if not better, than the English. They were, however, neither as disciplined, nor as dogged, nor as well led (some of their officers were French), and the sultan was forced to negotiate a peace.

Cornwallis might not have looked like a soldier to some—he looked more like a portly, grey-haired grandfather—but he certainly conducted himself
like one, oblivious to the ping of musket rounds, manifestly competent in his duties, and magnanimous in donating prize money to his troops. He returned to England in 1793, where he was appointed to relatively trifling diplomatic and military duties, including acting as master general of ordnance. In 1798, however, he was sent to do for Ireland what he had done for India. He again combined a political and military role as lord-lieutenant and commander in chief. He put down Irish rebels, staved off a French landing, and in the end, as he noted, found himself the surprised recipient of popular acclaim in Dublin—“Not an unpleasant circumstance to a man who had governed a country above two years by martial law.”
¹²
With Lord Castlereagh he had pushed for and won the Act of Union between Ireland and Great Britain. Union, he thought, was the only hope to bring good government to the Emerald Isle, but union should be concurrent with Catholic emancipation: “Until the Catholics are admitted into a general participation of rights, there will be no peace or safety in Ireland.”
¹³
When the king refused to emancipate the Catholics, Cornwallis resigned.

He returned to diplomatic service, negotiating the peace of Amiens, a brief respite in the Napoleonic wars, and then was reappointed governor-general of India, a post he did not want, and in which he died on 5 October 1805. Like the true servant of empire that he was, he was buried in India (in a grave still maintained by the Indian government) and a monument to his memory was erected in St. Paul's. As one of his biographers has written, “For sound advice and difficult duties, Cornwallis was the man to be approached. He was always ready to do his duty.... If a single man had to be chosen to illustrate the noblest features of the aristocratic ideal in the eighteenth century it might be Cornwallis. He was a true patriot.”
¹⁴

“Ireland, the under-developed country of no importance except when rebelling or invaded. . . . ”

—Norman Lloyd Williams,
Sir Walter Raleigh
¹

 

T
he central fact of Irish history is that Ireland is an appendage of England. Granted, the Irish have not seen it as such—and in their exhaustion with the place, the English have long since surrendered that view. But if England is the cockpit of Great Britain, Ireland is the Lesser Britain (which is how it was known to the ancients) of the British Isles. For most of its history, England regarded Ireland as an uncongenial, barbarous, and mystifying colony—but one necessary for the defense of the realm, because it was an all too convenient jumping-off point for possible invasions. At first the worry was the Spanish or the French or the Jacobites, but the threat continued through both twentieth-century World Wars, in which Ireland played less than stellar roles. In World War I, German U-boats tried to smuggle arms to the Irish rebels; and the farcical, if it hadn't been so tragic, Easter Rebellion of 1916 came while Britain was being bled white in the trenches defending the rule of law in Europe. In World War II, while Great Britain stood at one point alone against the forces of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, the Japanese militarists, Vichy France, and their allies, the bravely neutral Irish Republic dallied with Adolf Hitler, the Irish Republican Army openly allied itself with the Nazis, and it took all the forbearance British Prime Minister Winston Churchill could muster not to act on rumors that German U-boats were using western Irish ports.

There is much to admire about the Irish, but it is also easy to see why the English, when not regarding them as comical, tended to see them as shiftless, ignorant, stubborn, contumacious, and cruel—though the cruelty cut both ways, for the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland found it simple to justify extraordinary measures against such a race as the Irish, and the Protestant Orangemen of Ulster, as much as the seething nationalists of the South, gave support to Rudyard Kipling's observation that Ireland's second religion was hate.
²

It is important to note that the centuries-long conflict between England and Ireland is not primarily a religious one. Religion is merely another shillelagh with which the two sides bash each other. The Catholic faith came to Ireland through an Englishman, St. Patrick, whom Irish raiders kidnapped and enslaved, though Patrick refused to hold that against them. He made the Irish Christians and toppled the old Druidic religion.
³

When the Englishmen came again, it was in 1169, and many of them spoke French, because they were Normans. The invasion, under the authority of King Henry II of England, was actually made at the request of the ousted Irish king of Leinster, Dermot MacMurrough (Ireland had a plethora of petty kings who were occasionally united under a High King of Ireland). MacMurrough pledged fealty to Henry and so was allowed to recruit an army in Wales. Included in that army was his future son-in-law, the Earl of Pembroke, Richard de Clare, known as Strongbow—one of the first English villains in Irish history, because he had the temerity to marry
MacMurrough's daughter and thus bind Ireland and England together. (The English have always regarded Irish colleens as attractive—a tribute few Irishmen appreciate.) MacMurrough is regarded as a traitor; one moniker for him is “Dermot of the foreigners.”

MacMurrough's campaign to recapture his kingdom—and make himself High King of Ireland—began well but was soon stymied by the armies of his rivals. He asked Strongbow to land with reinforcements, which meant not only Welshmen but Normans. The pope had a stake in the campaign as well, because a Norman invasion of Ireland meant a more Catholic Ireland. Irish law—the Brehon laws, adjudicated by a juridical class of
brehons
—remained pagan and countenanced things like divorce and bigamy; moreover, the Church in Ireland was conformed to Rome only insofar as it was conformed to Canterbury (some Irish bishops made a point of being consecrated there) because the Irish Church was corrupted by secular appointments and clerical indiscipline while the English Church was seen as orthodox.