Pax Britannica (57 page)

A less involved imperial principle was the mystique of the Crown. To this genial madness there was much method. The Crown was not only a focus of loyalty to all the white colonies. To millions of coloured subjects it was the one token of British supremacy that seemed familiar—the one link with their own lost cultures of totem, mystery and chieftaincy. The Crown was still surrounded by trappings of divine right, trumpets and orbs, rubies and sapphires. It
expressed itself in gorgeous symbols, vast palaces, flags and armies: the throne of Tipu Sultan stood in the Viceroy’s palace at Calcutta precisely as though it had been taken in a fight between champions, Queen and Sultan cap-à-pie. Towering patricians in Government Houses professed themselves to be no more than the Crown’s servants, and above every bench of authority its symbol stood, powerful as a withered monkey’s claw in the hut of a magic-man. Upon the head especially of an aged and formidable female sovereign, the Crown was a potent item of joss.

The British skilfully exploited it. Whoever coined the phrase the Great White Queen knew what he was about. The most passionate subversives of Empire, the Irish themselves, retained a sneaking affection for the Queen, imperfectly expressed by Patrick Doyle, a sailor, who was found insensible on the Dublin quays on Jubilee eve, and explained that he had been singing
God
Save
the Q
ueen
when a Russian sailor assaulted him. To people like the Indians the existence of an Empress, however far away and alien, satisfied inherited tastes for strong personal rulers, like the Moguls and Mahrattas of old. Most middle-class Ceylon households had their big lithographs of Victoria, enbosomed with medals and surrounded by crowns and mottoes in Oxford frames: in Bombay many people thought the plague of that summer had occurred because the civic statue of the Great White Queen had recently been defaced.

Victoria was able to play upon sensitive chords of pride when she dealt with lesser rulers as one prince to another. The King of Tonga was so delighted by signs of imperial condescension that he adopted the name George, after George III, and named his wife Salote, a Polynesian attempt at Charlotte.
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In 1890 four envoys from the Queen arrived at the kraal of King Lobengula, to tell him that Her Britannic Majesty had granted a charter to the British South Africa Company, entitling it in effect to disinherit him (and in the event to kill him, too). Her envoys were wisely chosen. They were four
officers of the Royal Horse Guards, and they clanked into the royal compound dressed in full dress uniform, steel breastplates, high gleaming boots and helmet-plumes drooping low over their eyes. Lobengula was delighted with them, and his warriors queued to see their own faces reflected in the officers’ breastplates.
1
The peoples of the Indian States made their salaams to the Queen-Empress by way of their own Maharajahs, lesser inhabitants of the same mysterious plane: when Victoria was proclaimed Queen-Empress at a colossal Delhi durbar, in 1858, thousands of princely feudatories had swarmed to the ancient capital to share the royal unction.

The British missed no opportunity to demonstrate the wealth and grandeur of the Imperial Crown. Royal princes went on splendid tours, royal dukes commanded armies on distant stations. The Queen’s satraps carried themselves with airs of consequence far more impressive than any mere ambassador’s. They lived and moved like royalty themselves, distributing royal honours from time to time, and behaving very loftily indeed. A rich and self-respecting American woman, at a Viceregal soirée during a visit to Calcutta, was approached by an aide-de-camp with the news that His Excellency would now be graciously pleased to meet her, if she would kindly come to the ante-room. ‘In my country,’ she retorted, ‘gentlemen generally have the good manners to come to the ladies’—and leaving the palace in a huff at once feminist and republican, she boarded her yacht and sailed away. In the colonnade of the church of St John at Calcutta there stood the tomb of Lady Canning, widow of the first Viceroy, who had died of jungle fever in 1861. It was a huge stone sarcophagus covered in crests, big enough to contain a lady of gigantic stature, and it looked like the tomb of the first of a dynasty—as though the British, remembering the thrilling royal chapels of imperial Spain, intended to honour the Viceroys and their ladies in the grand manner of Isabel and Ferdinand.

The ceremonial of monarchy, skilfully translated to the distant
provinces, reinforced the imperial hold. Three knightly Orders sustained the Raj in India—the Most Exalted Order of the Star of India, the Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire, and for ladies the Imperial Order of the Crown of India. The Colonial Office had its own Order, of St Michael and St George, whose Chancellor’s office was along the corridor from the Colonial Secretary’s, whose motto was
Auspicium
Melioris
Aevi
—A Pledge of Better Times—and whose Prelate was the Archbishop of Rupert’s Land. All were attended with much glitter: the emblem of the Grand Cross of the Star of India was a cameo of Victoria surrounded by diamonds, with a star of diamonds above and the motto ‘Heaven’s Light Our Guide’. Loyal bigwigs were made more loyal still by the shrewd distribution of such honours (though the King of Siam turned up his nose at the Star of India, which was, he thought, only suitable for feudatories—‘Better give him nothing at all, then’, was Salisbury’s unperturbed response). Native dignitaries from Hong Kong to the Gold Coast became knights of English orders, queerly uniting in their persons the legacies of gonfalon and seneschal with heritages of tribal stool or ancestral carapace. In Ceylon a headman called Solomon Bandaranaike, presented with a ceremonial sword by the young Prince Albert in 1882, was officially allowed to adopt the name Bandaranaike Rajakumara-Kadukeralu—‘the Bandaranaike who was invested with a Sword by a Royal Prince’.
1
The imperialists themselves measured their careers from honours list to honours list, gradually ascending the scale of royal commendation, and taking it all very seriously. One of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee messages came from the Prince of Wales, who told his mother: ‘I cannot describe how touched I am by your great kindness in appointing me on the occasion of your Jubilee Grand Master of your great and distinguished Order of the Bath.’

The mystique of royalty was easily stretched into a mystique of imperialism. (A shrewd Basuto once asked Lord Bryce if Queen Victoria actually existed, or if she was purely a figment of British imagination.) On great occasions a rapt elevation seemed to hold the
whole organization in thrall, hushing even the agitators, and endowing the Empire, for its simpler subjects, with a supernatural immunity. It was the existence of a Supreme Person that did this, giving the Raj a character at once human and all-knowing—an Indian expression for it was
mabap
sirkar,
‘mother and father Government’. Queen and Empire became ecstatically fused.
The
Empress
Victoria’s
Golden
Jubilee
Anthem
,
a stirring Burmese march, long outlasted the Jubilee itself, and was played (on clarions, bamboo clappers, drums and silk-string harps) whenever the Chief Commissioner visited a town. When One Arrow, a colleague of Louis Riel, was charged with ‘levying war against Her Majesty’s Crown and dignity’, it was translated for his benefit as ‘kicking off Victoria’s bonnet and calling her bad names’. In India Bryce heard the story of a tiger which had escaped from the Lahore Zoo for several days, defying all efforts to recapture it. At last its keeper, approaching as close as he dare, abjured the beast to return to its cage ‘in the name of the British Government’—and it did.

Plain Englishness, in those days, was a principle. The British Empire was most decidedly British. This was not mere patriotism, saluting the flag at sundown, sticking up for the Mother Country, or humming
Rule
Britannia
,
as Lord Rosebery habitually did when his spirits flagged. It too was a kind of religion—which, like Islam, pervaded every human activity, and helped to regulate every function. Quite apart from the laws, the traditions and the facts of authority, there were specifically British ways of doing things. There were emotions no proper Englishman would display. There were tastes and taboos so pungently British that the whole world knew them, and expected them to be honoured.
The
Times
,
the club, leaving the gentlemen to their cigars, the stiff upper lip, hunting halloos at midnight by tight young subalterns on guest nights, bacon and eggs, walking around the deck a hundred times each morning, cricket,
Abide
With
Me—
all
these were imperial emblems, symptoms of Britishness, parodied and envied everywhere.

Such mannerisms were only just beginning to look funny. A
black tie in the jungle was still more admirable than absurd. The familiar tale of the two Englishmen silently raising their hats to each other as they pass in the middle of a totally uninhabited desert was told only half in mockery. The British liked this tart image of themselves, recognized its force and astutely lived up to it. It was an upper-class image, fostered by the public schools and encouraged by artists as different as Kinglake and Henty: it was an image so totally different from any other, so pronounced of character, so difficult to match or imitate, so rooted in many centuries of national integrity, that in itself it was an instrument of government. It bolstered the unassailable aloofness of the British. It made them seem a people apart, destined to command.

Few imperialists were prepared to modify their Britishness to their environment. Their manners were much the same in Mandalay as in Vancouver Island, and everywhere they applied their own values to the setting. Sometimes their confidence must have seemed insufferable—or at least incorrigible, for there was often a saving humour to it. One could never be quite sure whether they were joking or not. Surely they smiled, when they heard the Bombay clock tower peal out its imperial melodies—
Home
Sweet
Home
on weekdays, hymn tunes on the Sabbath? Surely they were amused themselves at the incongruity of the English names they imposed so blandly upon the maps of the world? In southern Ontario there were towns called Waterloo, Wellington, Delhi, and into Woolloomoloo Bay in Sydney complacently protruded Mrs MacQuarie’s Point. The bays, coves and outports of Newfoundland had names like Bumble Bee Bight, Blow-me-down, Heart’s Delight and Mutton Bay. The plan of Nuriya Eliya, in Ceylon, recorded the presence of Scrubs Bungalow, St Agatha’s, Unique View, Agnesia Cottage, Scandal Corner and Westward Ho! At Kodaikanal, in the Nilgiri Hills above Madras, a favourite excursion took the picnickers up Coaker’s Walk to Fairy Falls. There was a Charing Cross in Lahore; the counties of Jamaica were Surrey, Devon, Somerset and Middlesex; India was strewn with places named for British soldiers, administrators and engineers, like Jacobabad in the Punjab, or Clutterbuckganj in Bengal. Many an imperial place had an imperial nickname. Alexandria was ‘Alex’ to the British, Rawalpindi was
‘Pindi’, Johannesburg was Jo’burg from the start, Barbados was ‘Bimshire’, Kuala Lumpur was ‘K.L.’, and the sacred Swami Rock in Ceylon, ‘The Rock of the Saint’ to Hindus, was known to the British Army as Sammy Rock.

So strong an ambience was naturally infectious. Many subject peoples aped the British, encouraged to do so by the British policy of fostering Anglophile
élites.
In the Cape thousands of Africans wore European clothes, even to spats and tie-pins, and in Ceylon, the most thoroughly anglicized of the Asian possessions, even the women were dressing in the European mode. Smart Madrasis liked to let drop the fact that they had an account at Spencer’s, the Harrods of the Raj. Young Parsees in Bombay talked of ‘going home to England’. In French Canada English visitors were sometimes touched to hear hymns sung to the old air
Nelson
est
mort
au
sein
de
la
victoire
,
and in Burma they were sometimes disconcerted to hear Indian residents talking to the Burmese in their own brand of pigeon English—
‘Hi,
boy,
get
master
more
ice.’
Even the Boers of the Cape had taken to the well-known English habit of
le
week-end.

In these years African chiefs of savage splendour began to deck themselves in the fineries of imperial Britain—top-hats, tail-coats, epaulettes and topees—and the Indian princes reached an apogee of Indo-Englishness. In North Calcutta many of the local Hindu aristocrats maintained their town houses, and one of the best-known of them was the Marble Palace, the home of the Raja Rajendra Bahadur. It lay in a district uncompromisingly and heartrendingly Indian. Poverty lapped its gates. Naked sadhus leant against walls, fruit-sellers shouted, rickshaws wavered to and fro, gamblers crouched around their pavement boards, children and cats proliferated and cows loitered in alleyways. The air smelt of curry, joss-stick, dirt and animal droppings. At the gate of the Marble Palace, however, a janissary stood guard with his clouting-stick, and behind it the Raja lived in a style astonishingly imperial. His garden was discreetly ornamented with urns, lions and statues, as though only a ha-ha separated it from the green meadows of the Shires. His house was decorated in the grandest English manner. A couple of Reynolds and three Rubens hung upon its walls. Exquisite clocks and classical statuary stood all about, with a figure
of Queen Victoria, dressed in full ceremonial robes, larger than life in the hall. In the dining room of the Marble Palace Englishmen were favoured guests, and we need not doubt that for half an hour after dinner the ladies, retiring to one of the several silken drawing-rooms, left the Raja and their menfolk to themselves, their port and their jolly English anecdotes.