White Rajah

by Nigel Barley

  Three minutes before eight, the groom of the chambers ushered me from my apartment in the York Tower, conducted me along a splendid gallery, resplendent with lights, and pictures, and statues decorated with golden ornaments, the richest carpets, and bouquets of fresh flowers, and ushered me into a drawing-room as fine as mortal eye could wish to see. Directly afterward Lady Westmoreland and Lady Peel, with Lord Westmoreland and Sir Robert [the ex-Prime Minister] entered with the lord-in-waiting (Lord Morley), equerries and grooms: then came the Duke and Duchess of Bedford etc., etc., and last the doors were thrown wide open, and the Queen and Prince Albert and the Duchess of Kent were ushered in, attended by the court ladies. I had to kiss hands on my presentation: her Majesty said very sweetly that she was happy to make my acquaintance. I bowed to the ground … and I may conclude by saying, that, highly honoured as I have been, delighted and pleased, yet I shall be glad when it is over.3

  James’s headquarters were in Mivart’s Hotel on Lower Brook Street, where he ran a sort of male messroom of diners and late carousers, among them the father of his later biographer, Spenser St John. It was here that was born the fable of his romance with Angela Burdett-Coutts, the richest woman in England.

  One day at breakfast, a waiter brought in a letter, which Mr. Brooke asked permission to open immediately. He then said, ‘This is a curious one.’ It was from some lady, who, enamoured of his deeds, proposed herself in marriage. The letter continued that if Mr. Brooke had no intention of marrying, he was to destroy a note which was enclosed, and which contained her name, her address and all particulars as to her family and fortune.

  The guests laughingly said, ‘Have an intention to marry, and open the note’: but Mr. Brooke immediately rose from the table, saying, ‘I have no intention of marrying,’ and put the letter and the enclosure into the fire. If the lady be still living, it will be a comfort to her to know what became of her communication.4

  James’s life had an odd habit of assuming novelettish forms.

  Things were not going well, however, with James’s London agent. Wise was a thoroughly metropolitan and modern man, and the Brookes would always have a country-gentry suspicion of trade and businessmen. ‘The pollution of lucre takes possession of them. It is the devil’s own go-cart, with four or five other pet vices as lackeys hanging on behind.’5 Wise had been hoping to float a public company that would buy out James’s interest in Sarawak with himself owning half the shares and make lots of quick money. To James’s fury, he had already sent a trading ship to Sarawak without his permission and arranged the issue of trading tokens bearing James’s head instead of a legitimate currency. ‘I will become no party to a bubble,’ James raged. He would sell off his antimony monopoly, or the right to trade in opium, but no more. For him speculators divided into two groups – ‘the doers and the done’. ‘Slow, cautious, gradual’ were his watchwords, and above all it was the interests of locals that must be paramount. Never for a moment did he doubt his ability to know what those interests were, and there was always the suspicion that another’s profit was a theft from them. He would never have permitted the ruthless asset-stripping of Sarawak’s natural resources that followed on from independence. But James had the wit to see that the problem was more general, that, however much cold water he poured on excessive expectations, Europeans would always find this hard to believe because they were still navigating by the old mythical maps that made Sarawak a place of romance. ‘Really the mania for an El Dorado is so universal that I should not be astonished if such a place was discovered – a mountain of gold with nothing wanting but pickaxes – or some other such vulgar heaven upon earth. Everything distant seems to attract the imagination; distance lends enchantment to the view – distance of time softens down the crimes and errors of the dead – and Hope, herself, is but reality at a distance. In short, distance is a great and undiscovered principle!’6

  It could be his own epitaph. And Templer foolishly allowed Wise to see these confidential letters, where James expressed his doubts about him in such eloquent and hurtful turns of phrase. Wise would not forgive and forget – in fact he took copies, and his vindictiveness was set to become a running sore. Slandering James behind his back, Wise nevertheless showed him a sweet face in public, in the hope of exploiting the coal of Labuan, of which James was now named Governor, through his new Eastern Archipelago Company. In 1848, after a deal of bickering and the expensive bankruptcy of a trading company in which Wise had involved him, James effectively fired him, following it with the sort of nit-picking legalistic dispute he so enjoyed, over whether Wise was strictly an agent or a partner. In 1849 Wise entered into a relationship with James’s enemies and set to plotting his downfall.

  After four months James had had enough of England but, before leaving, he sat for his portrait by Sir Francis Grant RA, a painter newly fashionable by royal preferment. The painting shows him in Byronic pose, leaning on what is presumably a convenient rock, hair carefully tousled by a passing zephyr, staring into the future with a confidence that some might term arrogance. He is roguishly garbed in his Royal Yacht Squadron outfit, tight-trousered and bare-throated, knowingly swashbuckling. Behind him steam the rivers and jungles of Sarawak, while tropic clouds swirl messianically above. No wonder ladies sent him offers of marriage. The painter made him a present of the canvas; James never even bothered to say thank you.

  They set sail from Portsmouth in HMS Maeander, commanded by his old chum Keppel. On board were his new secretary Spenser St John, William Napier, the pettish Lieutenant Governor to Labuan, and Hugh Low, botanist and Secretary to the Government. There were also Mrs and Miss Napier, who were held by the men to be a confounded nuisance when tempers grew as short as space aboard the crowded ship. Miss Napier was of mixed race and devastatingly beautiful, a terrible threat to the established hierarchy of empire. More importantly for James, there were other friends aboard.

  Mr. Brooke … had a large cabin, and this was the rendezvous of as unruly a set of young officers as it has been my fortune to meet. He had a nephew on board, Charles Johnson, a staid sub-lieutenant, who endeavoured to preserve order, but it was of little avail. The noisy ones were in the ascendant, led by a laughing, bright-faced lad, who, when he was a midshipman on the Agincourt in 1845–47, had become acquainted with Mr. Brooke, and whose fondness for cherry-brandy was only equalled by his love of fun. No place in the cabin was respected: six or seven would throw themselves on the bed, careless of whether Mr. Brooke was there or not, and skylark over his body as if he were one of themselves. In fact, he was as full of play as any of them.7

  There was amazement at James’s forbearance. He really seemed to mind such youthful physical liberties not at all. James often crept about the deserted ship at night and ‘kept the middle watch [12 to 4 a.m.] with a friend’. ‘Scandal’ is perhaps too strong a word to use of the effect of this behaviour on the vessel, but St John notes that it led to ‘coolness’ from the officers, not perhaps improved by James’s dancing the polka with one of them. The ‘friend’ was, judging by later correspondence, probably that ‘laughing, bright-faced lad’ Charles Grant, nicknamed affectionately by him both Charley and Hoddy Doddy (an awkward and ungainly person). He was a considerable catch, the grandson of the Earl of Elgin. James had lavished upon him a good deal of attention and very expensive, sadly obvious, presents – weapons, clothes, jewellery; later there would be an Arab steed called Baby – since meeting him at the age of fourteen. The Francis Grant who had painted James was his uncle and – in line with Brookean nepotism – it was almost inevitable that one of James’s nephews should marry Charley’s sister. In 1847, before their return to England, James wrote him a twenty-page letter, ‘The Rajah’s Journal to the Hoddy Doddy’,8 while waiting for the young sailor to join him in Singapore. It contains a fantasy description of the mids of HMS Agincourt attacking a plum pudding:

  My eyes, a rare delicious sight is here

  A sight of wonder but no sight of fear.

  Solid, consisten
t, majestically tough,

  Behold a living map of unsliced Dough.

  The knitted walls a precipice present

  With plums and cannon bristling at each vent.

  Bombproof and arched, the heavy summit

  Like Etna sprinkled with eternal snows,

  Like Etna towering and like Etna hot

  Just like emerged from out the devil’s pot

  Conscious of strength, the smokey fabric stands,

  and frowns defiance to all mortal hands …

  So stands Dough Citadel, a virgin post,

  Uncaptured though begirt with many a host,

  Like other virgin places that I wot,

  Uncaptured yet because assailed not.

  Smoking it stands and seems to dare the worst.

  The storm is rife – not care I when it burst …

  And youthful Doddy firmly stands his ground.

  Unflinching still, he’s swallowed full a pound …

  One does not have to be a committed Freudian to detect a phallic subtext to all this. Another poem, after all, is written in affectionate terms to Charley’s adolescent pimples. It is the usual amalgam of fierce compassion, ardent self-sacrifice and barely suppressed lust that occurs in many of James’s letters to his young men, the forced, jokey voice of a passion that knows itself to be ultimately tragic. Charley himself gave a slightly baffled account of their relationship, though this could hardly have been a first encounter with homosexual attraction – he had, after all, served an apprenticeship in a nineteenth-century English public school followed by one in the British Navy – and he had the acuity to note the centrality of compassion in the formation of James’s love. Charley had been badly bullied, and the Rajah

  took a fancy to me, I can’t tell why, but I think partly because I was a little fellow, for I was about the smallest in the ship. We went together to Borneo, we were together for some months, he asked me to go to [blank] which I wished for very much but we were both refused for several had to come before me. We again met about a year afterwards. I saw a great deal of him, he was on board for nearly six months, we went to Brunei together and several other places. We again met at Penang, about six months after this, and it was there I saw so much of him. We were much together and often corresponded. The long and short of this is that I knew the Rajah and I loved him. If I got into difficulties or had any rows, or anything of that sort, I went to him for advice and you know the advice he gave me in his journal. We were, as you know, for a long time together during his stay in England, and we both learned a great deal about the other, and he got me appointed to this ship … I have great reason to be fond of the Rajah – I am proud of having such a friend, and I am sure he is as fond of me as I am of him, for he would not have done for me what he has, nor would he have done it without intending to do what he can.9

  In England, James regrets that he cannot visit his new passion at Kilgraston, his country seat. ‘All other considerations apart, I regret not being able to come because I should like to have stored up Kilgraston for a topic of conversation on a moonlight night in the East.’10 They seem instead to have met at James’s sister’s house, and James arranged for Charley’s transfer to Keppel’s ship, where he was irritated that Keppel would not release him to serve as his personal ADC. To overcome any doubts entertained by Hoddy Doddy’s parents over this strange attachment, his mother received a bracelet of shiny Sarawak gold and his father gruff, avuncular promises, man-to-man style, of £5,000 and more to be put in trust for the boy in case of the Rajah’s death. It was never paid. Nevertheless, in 1848 Hoddy Doddy left the Navy at James’s insistent urging and joined the Sarawak service. In a long letter, marked ‘Private and Confidential’, James wrote to Charley in 1847 concerning the duties of an ADC, summing them up as, ‘He is pulling the string which makes the puppets about him dance,’11 which is presumably the explanation for the existence of a comic poem on the same theme elsewhere in his papers. He continues, ‘You must watch the peculiarities of my disposition, and yield to them. You must frequently sacrifice your own will, and pleasure in trifles, to my wishes. You must be always kind in manner as well as in reality, and you will find that these sacrifices to me will each be without return and if that they be profitable that my heart will be more open and more confiding.’ After this, the letter breaks off to resume in an altered hand and a more sententious and pompous voice on the subject of statesmen.

  James and Charley seemed almost inseparable. When the Rajah travelled, his ADC, of course, travelled with him. On their next trip back to England they shared a cabin.

  When the ship arrived in Singapore, there was news waiting. James was to be invested as a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in a flurry of official engagements. He was Sir James at last, a pillar of the establishment, a romantic popular figure, an accredited British official. It was the high point of his life and he could have no idea that at that very moment, back in London, a new and less happy chapter was opening. For James Brooke and the Labuan administration had attracted the terrier-like attention of the honourable member for Montrose, Mr Joseph Hume, a staunch reforming Liberal with a reputation for sniffing out British colonial oppression. Although Britain was a major imperial power, the moment of government-sponsored jingoist expansion was not yet come. Colonies had been taken inadvertently and grudgingly. They were expensive and troublesome. Hume rose in the House to question the foolish expenditure on this newly British island of Labuan and other Liberals rallied to the cause, questioning the morality of British military actions in the east. Lord John Russell, the Prime Minister, defended James Brooke, and a strategic motion to cut the new Governor’s salary was swiftly defeated. So far so good. But it was the start of a long and bitter struggle.

  James and his entourage docked in Sarawak to a greeting of gongs and salutes. There would be high ceremony, but James was most gratified by the relatives of Hassim, who shinned up the side of the ship and in through a quarterlight to greet him with little formality but great feeling. The sailors were most moved to be sprinkled with coloured rice, gold dust and rosewater by Inda, beautiful daughter of Datuk Gaffur, strewn from a chamber pot. The band of the Maeander played as James’s new Sarawak flag was run up the flagpole for the first time. It was based on the Brooke family crest, a red and purple cross on a yellow ground. But they were surprised to find two new families installed in the courthouse. In their absence, the Borneo Church Mission had arrived. Sarawak had attracted so much public attention in England that it was considered fit for evangelisation – despite James’s own rather wild ideas of the Christian faith – and so the Sarawak mission had come into being, under the formidable Frank McDougall and his slight but indestructible wife, Harriette.

  At the Hanover Square meeting that led to the setting up of the mission, the Reverend Francis Thomas McDougall had made his appearance with a speech that had not impressed James. ‘The tone of his speech made Mr. Brooke sigh,’ St John noted, ‘but it was hoped his actions would be more sensible than his words.’12 Frank McDougall was a stout man of military family, one of the most highly qualified surgeons of his day, polyglot, an excellent sailor, a former mine manager, champion jockey, rower and scholar. In fact, Frank McDougall was depressingly outstanding in just about all spheres of human endeavour. His appearance was a little frightening, with wild hair, a huge beard and a complexion so dark as to be confusing in pigment-sensitive colonial circles. Harriette, his adoring wife, was musical on both harp and piano, artistic in watercolours and needle and thread, yet combined a ruthless practicality with the highest spiritual ideals. Though raised in a house grown wealthy on the sale of insurance, she had personally intervened to save Frank from a safe, dull and dutiful life at the British Museum, going in person to secure his release from employment there and urging him to undertake this new and dangerous endeavour among the ungodly. She would always be as much a mother as a wife to Frank. Harriette had what was kindly called ‘a speaking face’ and was also prone to giggle. At the first of
his sermons that she attended, fat Frank got stuck in the pulpit while delivering a sermon on the text ‘Strive to enter in by the strait gate’ and Harriette never forgot it. In later days, when Frank was a bishop, his superior wrote to him perplexedly, ‘I have taken the liberty … to caution you, now you are a chief pastor and a father in God, against excessive hilarity of spirits. There is a mild gravity, with occasional tokens of delight and pleasure, becoming your sacred character, not noisy mirth.’13

  They had come with a family called the Wrights, who took one look at Sarawak and moved straight back to Singapore. Harriette was made of sterner stuff, convinced that shadows merely enhance the interest of a scene. ‘I often think that no one really wants to go out as a missionary, who isn’t a little queer in the head,’ she remarked. Sarawak life would show the truth of the observation.

  James too had views about missionaries.

  The truth is, there are two sorts of Christian missions – the one of unmixed good, the other somewhat dangerous. Some missionaries begin at the wrong end – by preaching Christianity or running down Mohammedanism or any other received belief. These show gross ignorance of human nature, and neglect the principles of toleration; for if we abuse another’s belief, we confirm him in it, and make him a bigot, and he will rather retort abuse than hear reason. Such a mission will never succeed in any Malay country, and probably not amongst the Dayaks. The other sort of missionaries are the American, who live quietly, practise medicine, relieve the distressed, do not dispute or argue, and aim to educate the children. With the Dayaks it requires a person to foster and protect them, to teach them the arts of life, to inspire confidence, become acquainted with their manners and prejudices, and above all, to educate their children … If X wants a red-hot missionary crusade, to begin by telling the natives that their religion is a lie and their prophet an impostor – for though this be true, it should not be told – I want none such. If he wants a mission of reasonable and educated men, who know when to speak and when to be silent, who hold civilization and education as a means of religion, who will strive to enlarge the native mind, and to give them the outlines of our religion, its accordance with theirs in its earliest stages, to instruct the children, to benefit the adult, then the sooner they come the better.14