by Simon Schama
If Cornwallis were himself perspiring into his linen that morning in September, it may not have been a mere effect of the climate. He had only agreed to accept the king’s commission after twice declining, in 1782 and 1785, and even now he was not without deep misgivings. He knew very well that he had been appointed by the young Mr Pitt and his Foreign Secretary of State, the Marquis of Carmarthen, to redeem in the east what had been lost in the west. Even before the Treaty of Versailles (1783) recognizing the independence of the American states had been signed, the French, whose intervention in the war had made it inevitable, had seized the opportunity to pounce on the wounded lion, returning to India to sponsor the Sultan of Mysore in his war against the British. On Cornwallis’ shoulders now fell the responsibility of staving off further imperial collapse. It was a weighty thing.
Not that he felt he had anything with which to reproach himself, except for abandoning his Jemima who had implored him, tears in her eyes, not to go to America in 1778. When he had come back the following year, full of success and honour, she had again begged him not to agree to another command. But his suspicions of the capacity of the British generals in America, by turns reckless and timorous, would not let him decline. When he received news that she was deadly ill he hurried to return. With every dip of the ship into the resisting Atlantic trough, his anxiety and guilt grew more acute. She had asked, ordered in fact, that a thorn bush be grown at her wordless tombstone, and Cornwallis had honoured the mute reproach. He felt its pricks even now.
While Jemima was dying, so was British America. It was a cause of the deepest anguish for Cornwallis, who had been one of the most determined critics of the foolishness of successive governments’ policies that had led to the separation. In the House of Lords he had been one of just four peers who had voted against parliament’s assertion to tax its American colonies without their consent or representation. Throughout the years of embittered intimidation Cornwallis had shared Chatham’s despairing sense of the futility of the government’s coercive policy. But once the war had begun and Cornwallis was asked to serve, his disagreement, however severe, immediately took second place to his sense of duty. God knows he had tried to discharge it as well as he could, even while chafing at the irresolution of his seniors – first General Sir William Howe and then General Sir Henry Clinton. He had won the battles they had allowed him to fight – at White Plains and Brandywine – but they had turned a deaf ear to his wish that the northern and southern armies unite and strike, rather than disperse and dig in. At the Delaware, had they done so, they might have finished off Washington before the French had arrived. Once French ships had begun to command the entrance to the Chesapeake and land thousands of troops and supplies, Cornwallis understood that the British faced an entirely new war. Second in command to Clinton, he had vainly attempted to persuade him that only a union of the armies in Virginia – his marching north from the Carolinas and Clinton’s south from New York – could strike a decisive blow before it was too late. Clinton had sent but a feeble part of his force under General William Philips, who had died shortly after their arrival, and with this inadequate army had ordered Cornwallis to an ultimately indefensible position at Yorktown. Surrounded, outnumbered, his men already exhausted from their pyrrhic victory at Guildford in March 1781, their supplies cut off by a French fleet sealing the Chesapeake, Cornwallis had held out for three weeks. When the outer redoubts of their fort were stormed, he had made the fateful decision to forgo the pointless sacrifice of his men’s lives. Worn out and deeply depressed, his own health collapsed along with the fate of his army. On 19 October 1781, it was General O’Hara who made the formal surrender to Washington and led his troops away, their colours furled, drums beating, fifes playing (as well they might) ‘The World Turned Upside Down’, while the French lined the road out of Yorktown dressed in insultingly fresh white uniforms and black gaiters, the dandies of victory.
At home hardly anyone seemed to bear him ill will for the disaster, other than Clinton against whose public recriminations Cornwallis was painfully obliged to defend himself. But the king restored him to his office of Constable of the Tower. Barely a year later had come that first request to go to Bengal. Britain was smarting from the humiliation of what had happened in America; indeed, it was still actively embattled against an alliance of the French, Spanish and Dutch. Even from those who had opposed the war, there was no gloating over the outcome. Instead, public opinion had recoiled into a posture of wounded self-justification, professing astonishment that its purposes in America had been so badly misunderstood. It had not been a ‘tyranny’ that they had been defending, but the most liberal and enlightened constitution in the world: that of parliamentary sovereignty. The European monarchs in Madrid and Versailles who had colluded with rebellion would one day rue their reckless irresponsibility and cynical opportunism.
But although Cornwallis evidently shared the public need to reassert the disinterested nobility of the British Empire, he wondered whether India was truly an auspicious place to plant its flag. Was it, as the vituperative critics of the East India Company’s rule claimed, so steeped in venal selfishness, a racket disguised as a business, as to be entirely beyond redemption? Could virtue, he wondered, survive the tropics? What was it the philosophers said about despotism thriving where the orange grew? He was unsure if oranges grew here, but it was obvious that in the Indies, East as well as West, liberty was insecurely planted. Stupendous fortunes had been made, not by making men free but by making them servile; not by probity but by corruption; not by a benign and responsible diffusion of that wealth to the natives but by the most shameless coercion and extortion. After Lord North’s government had been sent packing, Charles James Fox had proposed legislation for the East India Company. His East India Bill made provisions for a parliamentary commission. The reforming Act that resulted made a clean separation between commercial and governmental activities. Company administration was now accountable to a Board of Control in London that would include members of the Privy Council and a Secretary of State. The regulatory act was designed to contain and reverse the personal empires of power and fortune that, Edmund Burke (who had largely written it) claimed, had been created under the pretext of securing a fair field for trade. In the parliamentary debates on India on 1 December 1783 Burke had hurled one of his rhetorical thunderbolts against the infamies perpetrated, so he said, by the Company and its servants on the helpless and much abused body of long-suffering Hindustan.
The violence and rapacity of the Company’s conduct could never, Burke asserted, be excused or explained by any savagery it claimed was threatening the peaceful prosecution of commerce, for the ‘thirty millions’ of British India, he said, were not
an abject and barbarous populace . . . but a people for ages, civilized and cultivated – cultivated by all the arts of polished life while we were yet in the woods. There have been (and still the skeletons remain) princes once of great dignity, authority and opulence. . . . There is to be found an ancient and venerable priesthood, the depository of their laws and learning and history, the guides of the people while living and consolation in death; a nobility of great antiquity and renown, a multitude of cities not exceeded in population and trade by those of the first class in Europe; merchants and bankers, individual houses of whom have once vied in capital with the Bank of England.
What had happened to this magnificent civilization following the intrusion of the Company? If it had weakened, had the East India Company made it sturdier? If it were beset with strife, had the Company given it peace? If it were impoverished, had the Company brought the blessings of prosperity? Not a bit of it. India had been subjected to the squalid adventurism and wanton cruelty of arrested adolescents, banditti in tricorn hats.
Our conquest there, after twenty years, is as crude as it was the first day. The natives scarcely know what it is to see the gray head of an Englishman. Young men (boys almost) govern there, without society and without sympathy with the natives. They have no mor
e social habits with the people than if they still resided in England – nor, indeed, any species of intercourse, but that which is necessary to making a sudden fortune, with a view to a remote settlement. Animated with all the avarice of age and all the impetuosity of youth they roll in one after another, wave after wave; and there is nothing before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting. Every rupee of profit made by an Englishman is lost forever to India.
The rise of British power in India, c. 1750–1805.
Nor had the English compensated for power with the execution of good works. No bridges, highways or reservoirs had been built, Burke insisted (not altogether accurately): ‘Were we to be driven out of India this day, nothing would remain to tell that it had been possessed, during the inglorious period of our dominion, by anything better than the ourang-utang or the tiger.’
And Cornwallis knew, with a sinking feeling, that he was supposed to make this right; that if the British Empire was to rise again, like the sun in the east, it would have to be through the imposition not of force but of justice and virtue. He would have to be the first of the true proconsuls of Bengal, not the convenient instrument of his countrymen’s rapacity. He was under no illusions how difficult this would be. Perhaps the task would be impossible. In 1784 he had written:
The more I turn it in my mind the less inclination I feel to undertake it. To abandon my children and every comfort this side of the grave; to quarrel with the Supreme Government in India, whatever it might be; to find that I have neither power to model the army or correct abuses; and, finally, to run the risk of being beat by some Nabob and being disgraced to all eternity, which from what I have read of these battles appears to be a very probable thing to happen – I cannot see in opposition to this, great renown and brilliant fortune.
In short, Cornwallis did not need another Yorktown, another America.
When William Pitt, the twenty-five-year-old son of Chatham, whom Cornwallis had so much admired, pressed, his resolution had wavered. ‘Inclination cries out every moment, “Do not think of it; why should you volunteer plague and misery?” Duty then whispers, “You are not sent here merely to please yourself; the wisdom of Providence had thought fit to put an insuperable bar to any great degree of happiness; . . . Try to be of some use; serve your country and your friends.”’ In the end, once he had gained the government’s agreement to place both civil and military supremacy in his hands (being only too aware that his predecessor, Warren Hastings, had faced personal enmity and political obstruction from the Calcutta Council), Cornwallis had accepted the commission. ‘I have been obliged to say yes and exchange a life of ease and content, to encounter all the plagues and miseries of command and public station.’ He would do his best to be a good Roman, an Aurelius beneath the banyan.
But when the English had first set their sights on India they had meant to be Carthaginians, not Romans; traders, not conquerors. No doubt the gentlemen relished the grandiose title bestowed on them by Queen Elizabeth’s charter of 1600 as ‘The Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies’; but really they were commercial adventurers after a little something on the side to pay for the deer park or the fashionably gilt Thames barge. As a descriptive phrase, the ‘East Indies’ was deliberately indeterminate, for any fortune hunter with an eye to economic geography would not be looking to the subcontinent at all, but further east, to the Indonesian archipelago whence came the high-priced treasures of pepper, mace, nutmeg and cloves. But between them the Portuguese and the Dutch seemed to have locked up the spice islands. When the English struggled to establish toe-hold trading posts at Bantam in Java and on the South Moluccan island of Ambon, they had been outgunned by the hostile Dutch fleets. In 1622, they had decided to cut their losses and leave the Moluccas when a punitive Dutch expedition razed the factory and executed the ten English merchants in 1623 to make their point. It was to pre-empt being at the mercy of a Dutch spice monopoly that the English settled for an easier entry via the back door – India itself. There, they believed, they could negotiate with the representatives of the Mughal emperor on equal terms with the Portuguese and the Dutch, rather than deal with local sultans who had pre-emptively committed themselves to enforcing a commercial exclusion zone. From a trading base or ‘factory’ on the Indian coast the English would be able to import some spices directly, but also acquire silk and cotton textiles, which could be used to barter in Bantam. Surplus textiles could always be exported back to England and re-exported to Europe. It was not exactly the silver mines of Peru, but it was a start: worth, at any rate, the investment of the 200 or so stockholders who came together as the ‘General Court’ of the East India Company at Leadenhall Street and elected, every year, twenty-four directors to manage their common enterprise.
In 1608 the Company ship Hector anchored off the prosperous, busy port of Surat on the Gujarat coast of western India. Despite the truculent opposition of the Portuguese, whose ‘factory’ had been established not far away at Goa a half century before, the English managed to secure from the Mughal governor the licence they needed to trade in spices and cloth. But the grandiose aim of the Jacobean gentlemen-merchants was some sort of formally negotiated treaty with the Emperor Jahangir himself, and in 1615 Sir Thomas Roe was sent in the capacity of an ambassador bearing letters from James I. The governor of Surat was unimpressed, and it was only a year later that Roe managed to obtain an audience with Jahangir, who was duly bemused both by Roe’s refusal to prostrate himself in the accustomed way before the Peacock Throne (instead doffing his hat and bowing from the waist) and by the very idea of a far-off ‘king’ who would allow himself to be represented by common merchants. On the other hand, the emperor’s councillors believed they had nothing to lose from the grant of a firman licence, allowing trade under immunity from imperial taxes. There was obviously nothing these Feringhis could bring that India might want except large quantities of silver, which the government was happy to have added to its coffers. Besides, cloth exports would provide work for the weavers, bleachers and dyers of the Mughal empire and spread the unquestionable splendours of their arts about the world. Might these new traders be an annoyance? No more, surely, than the buzz of a gnat around the hindquarters of a war elephant.
For two generations dividends were declared in the Company sales rooms at Leadenhall Street. As the seventeenth century wore on, however, they were shrinking, offset by heavy operational costs, not least those of defence against competitors and pirates. But although the outlook for the India trade was uncertain around 1660, its champions, like Josiah Child, who had made a fortune fitting out the fleets of the Commonwealth and Protectorate and who sailed on into the mercantile world of the Restoration, remained optimistic – always provided, he insisted, that the Company understand it would have to act with political and military boldness if its commercial operations were ever to be secure. By the 1680s there seemed to be something substantially worth defending. The Company had settled into a number of Indian commercial centres such as Masulipatnam in the southeast and Hooghly in west Bengal. In those cities it built warehouses and one-storey houses for its ‘factors’ and ‘writers’ (clerks), usually near the protecting shadow of the Mughal fort. But in the second half of the seventeenth century there were other sites – Bombay on the west, transferred to English control as part of the Portuguese Catherine of Braganza’s dowry as queen of Charles II; Madras on the Coromandel coast; and, from 1690, Calcutta in west Bengal – where the Company custom-built its ‘factories’ inside a fortified bastion, facing the sea on one side and garrisoned with a handful of Company soldiers, Indian, Portuguese–Eurasian and other Europeans. Either within its walls or protected by them, clusters of one-storey houses were built from the mixture of matted hemp, brick-dust and lime called pucca. Facing them was a church in the reassuring English manner, complete with colonnaded porch, steeple and rows of b
oxed pews made of tropical hardwoods. Behind it lay a churchyard, its graves more populous than the pews. Beyond the walls of this ‘White Town’ a ‘Black Town’ of Indian merchants, clerks and money-lenders lived, while a third community of maritime workers – boatmen, stevedores, carters and fishermen – gathered closer to the harbour. Betwixt and between them all were small but extremely important communities of Armenians and Jews who acted as brokers and intermediary agents.
By 1700 the daily round of British life in India was already established: a hard ride before breakfast; morning prayers courtesy of the chaplain; business till the communal dinner (around two or three o’clock), with a tiffin of light curries staving off the pangs between; siesta after dinner; a little more business, then another ride, a fishing or fowling expedition, and cards and a light supper before bed. That was the official version, at any rate. But from less demure accounts, the colonies of bored, badly paid younger sons forced to come to India and brave the terrifying mortality (some 460 deaths in one hot season in Calcutta in a British population of 1200) behaved much as one would expect: gambling heavily; sinking vats of arrack while they did so; fighting and duelling among themselves; and either keeping Indian or Eurasian mistresses or visiting the Black Town brothels between doses of mercury to cure the maladies they acquired from over-indulgence there. Ostensibly in charge of all this was a president – not in any sense a true governor, but the senior merchant (in settlements where promotion came strictly by seniority), attempting to do the bidding of his masters in London while necessarily winking an eye at the extensive private business carried on by its servants in India to compensate for their niggardly salaries. At least the presidents knew how to put on a good show, never leaving the fort without an escort of armed Indian soldiers, two Union flags and the blare of ‘country musick’, loud enough, one commentator said, to make the natives believe we had gone mad.
