Pax Britannica (19 page)

What had the Empire done for St Lucia? asked a critic on the always fractious
Voice.
Freed the slaves, thus ruining the sugar economy and inciting social and political troubles which were only just beginning. Built a few roads, at the cost of a corps of Public Works Department officials ‘earning large salaries for doing nothing’, while allowing the excellent old French roads to disintegrate. Consistently raised taxation, at a rate ten times faster than the rise in incomes. Progress in education had been feeble, there had been no political progress for a century, nothing had been done to
encourage a varied agriculture. Progress in medicine, said the writer darkly, had only driven ‘the Bush Man, the Mesmerist and the Obeahman to seek fresh fields’, and down at the docks the vice was worse than ever. St Lucia was ‘an undeveloped estate of the Empire’: they were still building military installations indeed, but already there were suggestions that one day the Royal Navy, reconsidering its strategies, might recall its weak squadrons from such specks upon the imperial seas, and reduce the circumstances of the property still further.

The
Voice
was doubtless exaggerating the discontent—its editor, R. G. McHugh, was an argumentative man. But he was expressing a basic imperial truth: that unless such a minor possession was economically valuable or strategically necessary, its membership of the Empire would not bring it much advantage. Only too often these outposts had been acquired merely to keep a rival out, or in pursuit of some forgotten tactical purpose: romantic though they looked on the imperial gazeteers, not much thought or money was expended on their welfare. It was an imperial dogma that colonies must be, as far as possible, financially self-sufficient. There were no imperial development funds or technical programmes. Free Trade might be abandoned by the big self-governing colonies, but these little places were altogether at the mercy of whatever economic theory was fashionable in England, and their British markets were in no way protected against foreign competition.

It was one of the merits of the New Imperialism that all this was changing, and that Joseph Chamberlain saw the Empire partly as a development agency, dedicated to technical and economic improvement everywhere. But for the moment Mr McHugh had a point: the poorer a British colony was, the poorer it was likely to remain.

Brigade-Surgeon Gouldsbury never returned to St Lucia, for he died in London soon afterwards. One guesses somehow that perhaps for him, as for Mrs Gouldsbury, the island had palled a little: that he seemed to have heard just once too often about the splendour of those ancestral chateaux in Burgundy; that when you had read one
leader in the
Voice
you had read them all; that really, he never wanted to hear another word about that wretched Steam Fire Engine; that those damned mongooses were a perfect curse; that he did wish Rea wouldn’t keep spouting odes at him; and that by Heavens, at least in England he was unlikely to run into that confounded excursionist Howard again, the one who never stopped talking about Napoleon.

‘
N
O Caesar or Charlemagne,’ Disraeli once said, ‘ever presided over a dominion so peculiar. Its flag floats on many waters, it has provinces in every zone, they are inhabited by persons of different races, different religions, different laws, manners, customs.’ How to govern this prodigious sprawl was one of the great political challenges of history. Fifty years before most Englishmen would have preferred to decline it: the colonies were considered a nuisance then, and the general view was that the sooner they dropped off the family tree, the better. Now the New Imperialism welcomed the challenge, and fostered a response. The Empire was to be consolidated, and it was to be given System.

Disraeli’s vision of the British Empire was still valid in the 1890s. He frankly recognized its precarious diversity. There was a core of white colonies bound to Britain by blood, taste and common history: but there was an equal mass of territories, mostly tropical, whose allegiance had been imposed upon them, and whose people had nothing in common with the British except the fact of sovereignty. Some of these peoples, as Disraeli saw it, were bound to Britain because it was British power that secured their personal liberties. Some were bound by ‘material as well as moral considerations’. Many more were bound because they had to be, because they recognized ‘the commanding spirit of these islands that had formed and fashioned in such a manner so great a portion of the globe’.

The commanding spirit was still there. Legally there was no such thing as a British Empire. It had no constitutional meaning. Physically, too, it was a kind of fiction, or bluff, in that it implied a far stronger power at the centre than really existed. But in the 1890s the British were determined that this heterogeneous structure had logic to it, and that it could be rationalized or emotionalized into order.

The one immovable thing about it was the Crown. This was a Royal Empire, and the idea that people could share in the Pax Britannica without paying allegiance to the monarchy would have struck the New Imperialists as unnatural, or worse still perfectly senseless. Everywhere in the Empire the symbol of the Crown, on post-boxes and dockyard gates, on postage stamps and above newspaper mastheads, sombrely surmounting the judges’ bench or gaily glittering at the warship’s head—everywhere the Crown stood for the one overriding authority, almost beyond human reach, which linked one part of the Empire with the other. There was no people in the Empire, advanced as Canadians or backward as Bechuana tribesmen, who did not dimly recognize the power of the Crown. In every territory the Queen’s representative enjoyed a regal consequence himself, lifting him far above petty politics: in India a Viceroy, in Canada a Governor-General, in Jamaica a Captain-General, in the Turks and Caicos Islands a Chief Commissioner, in St Vincent an Administrator. Splendid and full of symbolism was the aura of command surrounding such men, reminding the people that the Governor was the voice of the Queen herself, as the priest speaks for God. The Governor of Natal, in his mansion at Pietermaritzburg, was attended by barefoot Zulu servants, wearing white linen jackets hemmed with yellow. A Fijian waited upon the table of the Governor of Ceylon. Government House at Melbourne, modelled upon Queen Victoria’s house at Osborne, in the Isle of Wight, had a ballroom eighteen feet longer than the great hall of Buckingham Palace.

Grandest of all was the Viceroy of India, Victoria’s shadow in the greatest of her dominions. The title was little more than an honorific, the power of the office arising from the subsidiary rank of Governor-General: but it had an imperial ring to it, and was borne by only one other dignitary of Empire—the Queen’s man in Ireland. There had been ten Viceroys of India since the Crown took over from the East India Company in 1858. The tenth was Victor Alexander Bruce, 9th Earl of Elgin and 13th of Kincardine, the son of
another Viceroy of India (who was buried in India), and the grandson of Lord Durham, author of a celebrated report on the Canadian Constitution. Elgin was educated at Eton and Balliol, under the famous Dr Jowett, and had married a daughter of the Earl of South-esk. In 1893 this tremendous swell had reluctantly accepted the Viceroyalty. He thought himself incompetent for the job, and, wrote Sir Frank Brown in the
Dictionary
of
National
Biography
‚
‘his recognition of his own limitations was so far justified that he cannot be reckoned among the outstanding governors-general of India’.

At least he assumed his dignities as to the manner born. To anyone with a background less gorgeous than that of a British aristocrat at this opulent moment of British history, the Viceregal circumstances might have seemed daunting indeed. In Calcutta the Viceroy lived in a palace fit for any king.
1
Huge lions surmounted its gates and sphinxes couchant guarded its doors, together with cannon on pale blue carriages, and one borne on the wings of a dragon. Brilliant Indian lancers clattered through the courtyards, thirteen aides-de-camp deferentially awaited instructions, servants in liveries of gold and crimson padded down vast corridors beneath the trophies, treasures and monumental portraits assembled during the three centuries of the British presence. In the marble-floored dining-room six busts of Caesars, taken from a captured French ship, reminded Lord Elgin of his imperial status, even over the soup.

A portrait of the Viceroy’s own father, the 8th Earl, hung in the Council Room, along a wall from Clive and Warren Hastings, and there were portraits, too, of Louis XIV, an eighteenth-century Shah of Persia, an Amir of Kabul and several English kings and queens. The ballroom was upstairs, with a vast chandelier originally intended as a present from the King of France to the Nizam of Hyderabad, and artlessly displayed upon an anteroom table were a sheaf of ancient treaties—with Hyderabad, with Mysore, with Seringapatam, agreements which had first consolidated the British Raj in India, and thus laid the foundations for all this splendour.

From this house the Viceroy moved magnificently through India,
resplendent with all the colour and dash of the vast Empire at his feet, with his superb bodyguard jangling scarlet beside his carriage, silken Indian princes bowing at his carpet, generals quivering at the salute and ceremonial salutes of thirty-one guns—independent Asian sovereigns were only entitled to twenty-one, and even the Queen-Empress herself only got 101. He had a pleasant country house at Barrackpur, twenty miles up the Hooghly River, with moorings for the Viceregal yacht: and when the summer came, and the heat of the Indian plains became incompatible with the imperial dignity, up he went with his army of attendants to the hill station of Simla. There on a hill-top his summer palace awaited him, scrubbed and gleaming for the season, its major-domos, secretaries, chefs and myriad maidservants immaculate and expectant in their several departments—a sprawling chalet set in a delicious garden, where a Vicereine might stroll in the mountain evening spaciously, as a great chatelaine should, and the pines, streams and crispness reminded visitors that these were rulers from the distant north, sent by royal command to govern with such grandeur the sweltering territories of Asia.

The Crown at the very summit, with the Queen-Empress to sign the imperial decrees, and such superb courtiers stationed across the Empire: below it something very different, Parliament. The British Parliament in Westminster stood as trustee of the Pax. The supreme source of imperial policy was the elected assembly of the British people, which had nothing celestial to it at all, wavered inconsistently from view to view, was quite likely to reverse its entire imperial attitude from one general election to another, and had been until recently notoriously uninterested in imperial affairs anyway. This was the legislative authority of Empire, and its executive heads, under the Queen and the Prime Minister, were the Secretaries of State for India and the Colonies, politicians appointed to those offices as stages in a public career.

Parliament had traditionally left the running of the Empire to the executive, and in imperial matters generally did what the
Government asked. Ireland, the one exception, had been a running passion of parliamentarians throughout the century, but India seldom aroused a debate. ‘The real trouble is’, as the Duke of Wellington had remarked long before, ‘that the public cannot be brought to attend to an Indian subject.’ In the nineties there was rather more interest at Westminster, thanks to the popularity of the New Imperialism, and several active lobbies kept the issues of Empire in Hansard’s columns, even between imperial crises. The philanthropic lobby nagged the conscience of M.P.s with questions about the mistreatment of Kaffirs, or the Indian opium monopoly, or slave-running in the Persian Gulf. The financial lobby urged the interests of the chartered companies, the military activists pressed for a Forward Policy on the Afghan frontier, retired colonial administrators fought against suggestions of weakness or withdrawal. Sometimes parliamentarians actually went out to the colonies to see for themselves, and to earn the contempt of those who, like Kipling, despised the instant expert.

For the run-of-the-mill politician, however, at more run-of-the-mill moments, the issues of Empire were mostly glamorous irrelevances, whose effect on domestic politics was normally peripheral, and whose meaning in terms of votes had never been thoroughly examined. It was a paradox of history that so tremendous an Empire lay at the disposal of such fluctuating wills and interests: for Parliament could pass laws binding in every single imperial possession, even the self-governing colonies, and colonial laws were void if they clashed with Westminster’s Acts. It was not called an Imperial Parliament for nothing (though in fact the title was only adopted when, in 1800, the Dublin Parliament was abolished, and Westminster assumed its duties too).

From the graceful little iron suspension bridge that spanned the lake in St James’s Park one of the most celebrated views in London could be obtained. It was a delectably frivolous spot in the very centre of the capital, and had been for centuries a favourite place of dalliance and promenade. A Venetian smell of water and damp earth
hung about the bridge, and the skyline was brushed with ornamental trees. Geese strutted magnificently across the lawns; the famous park pelicans flapped their great wings upon their rock. Beyond the wooded island at the east end of the lake sat a rustic lodge, the home of the park-keeper, and towering above it rose the halls of Authority: to the right, through the trees, Big Ben and the towers of Westminster Abbey, to the left the exotic cupolas of the Horse Guards, and in the centre, ponderous and elaborate, the offices of Empire, with a square tower and a plethora of flagstaffs.
1

Below Parliament, and subject to its Secretaries of State, two professional departments presided over the British Empire. They were both housed in George Gilbert Scott’s Italianate Government offices in Whitehall, south of Downing Street, east of St James’s Park. The building had been the subject of a famous architectural controversy of the fifties—Scott wanted to build it in the Gothic style, but Gothic had come to be identified with Toryism, and when the Whigs returned to power in 1857 Lord Palmerston insisted on Renaissance. The structure stood there now in tremendous mediocrity, vast but uncompelling. The Colonial Office, in the north-west corner of the block, was decorated with symbolic figures of Empire, together with portrait medallions of nine former Colonial Secretaries: the India Office had a tower overlooking the park, and was embellished with Governors-General, emblems of Indian rivers and cities, Indian racial types and loyal feudatories. The Colonial Office, furnished in dark mahogany and deep leather, with smoky coal fires and high narrow corridors, possessed a fireplace, taken from the waiting-room of its old premises in Whitehall, before which Nelson and Wellington had warmed themselves during their only meeting, shortly before Trafalgar. The India Office contained fine collections of imperial statuary, clocks, old furniture and pictures, inherited
from the East India Company and now disposed about its immense staircases, its library and its majolica-ornamented covered courtyard. Each department was run by a Permanent Under-Secretary from the Home Civil Service, but each had its own pronounced character and body of tradition. There had never been a single imperial administration, just as there was never a Minister of Empire.

The Colonial Office was established in 1854: until then the colonies were thrown in with the armed forces under the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. It was organized in five territorial departments: the West Indian; the North American and Australian, to which Cyprus and Gibraltar were attached; the West African, which also handled Malta; the South African; the Asian. India was outside the office’s concern, and several protectorates of the Empire were administered by the Foreign Office (elsewhere in the same building). It was a very small establishment to govern such a domain: like a comfortable and unpretentious club. Many of its senior members were bachelors. They all knew each other well, nobody called anybody ‘sir’, one entered a colleague’s room without appointment, without even knocking on the door. There were only twenty-three first-class clerks, as its senior functionaries were called, and to administer the Empire in detail they would have required an encyclopedic familiarity with matters ranging from tropical crop-rotation to the circumcision of females. Fortunately they normally left the colonies to run themselves. Most colonial governors were professionals, many of them former first-class clerks themselves, and if things went reasonably smoothly in St Lucia, Fiji or Ceylon it was the prudent practice of the Colonial Office to leave well alone.