The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (26 page)

Curzon was an Orientalist—he loved Asia, and wanted it preserved in all its rough, exotic glory, and he spent enormous amounts of time, money, and effort restoring historic Indian buildings—even booting Britons out in the process. India's historical architecture had no better friend than Curzon. He was also something of a conservationist, showing a rare concern for the preservation of Indian wildlife.

Running through all this was Curzon's belief in British aristocrats running India with the assistance of Indian aristocrats who, if they went to Oxford or Cambridge, would only return to India despising their own people and picking up the worst habits a wealthy young man could pick up in such surroundings—an excessive taste for drink and a proclivity for dissipation. Curzon preferred princes on elephants to princes gambling in Monte Carlo and maintaining European mistresses. He considered it part of his duty to lecture the princes on their family affairs—and, as might be
surmised, he was very fond of lecturing other people. While Curzon believed in the cult of the English gentleman and saw Christianity as an important source of Western superiority, he did not believe that Christianity was an exportable commodity or that Indian princes should be English gentlemen rather than Indian ones. It was to this end that Curzon reformed the Indian colleges and set up an Indian officer-training program. The princes were still taught English ways and tastes, but at least they learned them in India, and military training and discipline was the one way to shore up the moral fibre of princes who might otherwise unravel with wine, women, and song.

While Curzon remained a mighty force in India—when his wife fell sick in England he received messages of sympathy from all the Indian princes—his abortive second term as viceroy (1904–05) helped to ruin his reputation. Curzon authorized the administrative partition of Bengal—a province designed by British line-drawers and now amended by them, but to the dismay of the Bengalis, who had taken fiercely to the “nationality” given them by the British; they would not have it redrawn away, and the new lines were eventually scrapped (in 1911). More immediately important to Curzon was his conflict with the new commander in chief of the Indian Army, Lord Kitchener. Kitchener successfully conspired against Curzon to concentrate all military authority in his own hands (stripping it from the Military Member of the Viceroy's Council, who represented the Military Department and acted as both an adviser to the Viceroy and the commander in chief). In consequence, Curzon resigned.

At home, and despite enjoying the king's favor, Curzon's political career went on the skids, without a parliamentary seat and denied a peerage. In 1906 his wife Mary, who had given him three daughters, died. She was only thirty-six, but the last two years of her life had been blighted by sickness. Despairing after his wife's death, Curzon wrote, “Every man's hand has long been against me, and now God's hand has turned against me too.”
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Curzon had lost an empire and had yet to find a role. He busied himself in the meantime with a myriad of architectural projects and with micromanaging every responsibility to which he could turn his hand, believing that he (assisted by his daughters) was better at weeding than any gardener, better at dusting books than any housekeeper, and better at devising the curriculum for his girls' schooling than any governess. He became a chancellor at Oxford and was elevated to the House of Lords, where he became
a defender of its prerogatives, while also being a champion of reform. He showed himself ahead of his time in his opposition to female suffrage.

But really, until the First World War, it seemed that Curzon's star had fallen. He certainly felt so; at the outset of the war he felt sadly unemployed, lamenting that “a man who at 39 was thought good enough to rule 300 millions of people—and did rule them—is apparently useless at 55 when the existence of his country is at stake.”
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He took a special interest in supporting India's military units (ensuring, for instance, that they were all supplied with massive water boilers—paid for out of his own pocket—for tea), harbored the Belgian royal family on his estates, and was an active opponent, again, of Lord Kitchener, who argued for an all-volunteer force while Curzon believed in the necessity of conscription.

In December 1916, the new prime minister, David Lloyd George, leading a Liberal-Tory Coalition government, brought Curzon into the War Cabinet. Curzon was easily the best-informed cabinet member on questions involving India and the Middle East, but his advice was routinely ignored. He opposed occupying any more of Mesopotamia beyond the port of Basra; he opposed promising the Arabs their own state or carving states out of the defeated Ottoman Empire, and he was opposed to the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which put the British government on record supporting a Jewish state in Palestine. His arguments were, in each of these cases, dismissed, which resulted in an enormously costly campaign in Mesopotamia, competing promises to the Arabs and the French, and the sowing of greater enmity between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East. His great fear was that the Allies would negotiate a peace in the West in exchange for giving Germany a free hand in Eastern Europe—though this hardly seems the nightmare Curzon imagined it to be.

Curzon accepted that Allied war rhetoric inevitably meant concessions on self-government for India, but he was quick to insist that self-government
could only be successfully achieved under British tutelage and supervision, which could last for centuries. Many of his parliamentary colleagues, however, were impatient to speed things along. Curzon accepted that nationalism seemed an unstoppable consequence of the war, and that some people preferred to be badly governed by their own rather than well governed by another. But independence, to which he thought hasty reforms inevitably led, would in his view be a tragedy for the Indians
and
the British—putting the interests of politicized Bengali lawyers over the interests of the Indian people as a whole and relegating Britain to a second-rank power.

In 1919, he became foreign secretary, a position that had once seemed inevitable but that he finally achieved only by lobbying Lloyd George. Curzon drew the border between Poland and the Soviet Union (the Curzon Line) and rebuffed the secretary of state for war, Winston Churchill, who wanted to crush the Russian Bolsheviks, because Curzon feared the White Russians would more seriously threaten British interests in central Asia. He also defeated Churchill on the matter of Egypt, over which Lloyd George and Churchill wanted to maintain the British protectorate that had existed under the Ottoman Empire, while Curzon insisted on recognizing Egyptian independence (albeit under British supervision and military defense).

That victory, if such it was, had to compensate for the unraveling agreement he thought he had reached with Persia. Curzon had agreed to guarantee Persia's independence, while flooding it with British assistance—political, military, technical, and commercial—in exchange for securing British rights to Persia's oil fields. As Curzon conceived the agreement, it neatly welded Persian self-interest to the interests of the British Empire. To his dismay the agreement was never formally ratified in Tehran and was then repudiated by the new Persian government (taking power in a military coup) in 1921, though the Persians still wanted British aid and assistance. His amour-propre badly wounded by Persian ingratitude—and the
indifference of his Cabinet colleagues who were far more interested in retrenching British commitments than extending them—he vowed never to negotiate with the Persians again.

He was also determined, despite his Persian setback, not to resign again. His resignation as viceroy had cast him into the political wilderness, and though he felt forever at odds with Churchill and Lloyd George (who opposed him on Greek and Turkish policy; they being philhellenes, he being pragmatically pro-Turk), he was determined to stick it out. Indeed he stuck it out even after the Conservatives came to power and he was passed over, to his immense disappointment and even shame, as prime minister—that prize going to Stanley Baldwin. But in January 1924, Labour took power and Curzon was out at the Foreign Office. When the Conservatives were returned to power later in the year, Baldwin kept him as leader of the House of Lords but denied him the Foreign Office, offering him in recompense the chairmanship of the Committee of Imperial Defence.
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He died a few months later, prematurely aged from overwork.

Curzon had spilled out his life for the cause of the Empire—and most particularly for India. But by the time he died, his ideals had faded from a Britain that was more democratic, less imperialistic, and even capable of electing a socialist government. He was not a man easy to like, but he was a dedicated patriot all the same. Churchill's epitaph for him has never been bettered: “The morning had been golden; the noontide was bronze; and the evening lead. But all were solid and each was polished till it shone after its fashion.”
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“The only man I have ever been impressed with all my life is Lord Mountbatten.”

 

I
f nothing else, Mountbatten looked the part—handsome, patrician, tall and striking in uniform, perfect casting for a modern viceroy of India, even if his inevitable role was to preside over an epic tragedy. He was born a German prince—Prince Louis of Battenberg—though his place of birth was Windsor Castle and his eventual moniker of choice was Dickie. His father, also styled Prince Louis of Battenberg, had become a British subject when he joined the Royal Navy at the age of fourteen—an idea recommended to him by two of his English cousins, who happened to be the son and daughter of Queen Victoria.