The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire

by H. W. Crocker, III

  An Eighteenth-Century Hannibal

  “Be a little careful, and tread softly; for depend upon it, you have a modern Hannibal to deal with in the person of Cornwallis.”

  Patriot General Nathanael Greene to General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, quoted in Burke Davis, The Cowpen-Guilford Courthouse Campaign (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 69

  He raced to confront patriot Nathanael Greene at Guildford Courthouse (15 March 1781) in Greensboro, North Carolina, though Greene held an easily defended position on the high ground flanked by covering woods. The patriots outnumbered him more than two to one, but Cornwallis’s intelligence reports told him he was outnumbered four to one. He decided to attack regardless, trusting to the steadiness of his British regulars. His confidence and determination were well placed, as his troops charged through rebel militiamen, shot down sharpshooters, and advanced straight through canister fire until their bayonets pricked the Americans into retreat.

  The victory, of course, came at a high cost: at least a quarter of his force. Rubbing salt into the wound was that it did nothing to cement North Carolina’s allegiance to the Crown or crush the rebels’ ambitions. Cornwallis decided his only viable strategy was to plunge into Virginia, despite having only 1,400 men. He hoped to compel Washington and Greene to combine against him; then he could defeat them entire with reinforcements from some of the thousands of troops that sat idle with Clinton in New York. Events, however, betrayed Cornwallis’s hopes.

  Yorktown

  Clinton had sent troops to Virginia, but they were intended to fortify a naval base at Portsmouth. Cornwallis had entirely other ideas. Forts were superfluous to winning the war; what was necessary was destroying the rebel army, and Virginia was the center of gravity of the war in the South; force its submission and the Carolinas were secured. Clinton, however, remained convinced that New York was the center of the war. Combined French and American forces, he believed, would soon be striking against him; the Southern theatre was essentially a diversionary one. He ordered Cornwallis to locate his troops at either Williamsburg or Yorktown, where British ships could reach him; the plan was not to reinforce Cornwallis but for Cornwallis to reinforce Clinton.

  The problem was that it was the French Navy that arrived in Chesapeake Bay—disembarking French troops and rebuffing the Royal Navy. With Cornwallis’s men divided between Yorktown and Gloucester (necessary for the defense of Yorktown), he could either try to break out against the French regulars who outnumbered him or he could dig in for a siege. Cornwallis planned for a breakout—until, that is, he received a dispatch from Clinton promising troops. With that promise he decided to stick it out at Yorktown. But now racing down to Yorktown was Washington, who recognized that Cornwallis was trapped and could be destroyed. Cornwallis kept Tarleton sweeping his front and his men furiously building entrenchments; the rival armies traded bombardments; but as the siege tightened and the relief force didn’t arrive, the end was inevitable. Cornwallis, pleading ill health, did not meet his conquerors at the surrender ceremony. Instead he sent Brigadier General Charles O’Hara, who tried to present Cornwallis’s sword to the French commander the Comte de Rochambeau, who indicated that the honor belonged to General Washington. Washington returned O’Hara’s snub by directing him to surrender to his own second-in-command, General Benjamin Lincoln.

  A Passage to India

  Defeat at Yorktown did not end Cornwallis’s career. Not only did he have the frisson of having his voyage home interrupted by a French privateer, but when he did return to Old Blighty he found himself cheered on all sides: Lord North’s government held him blameless, dumping its vitriol on General Clinton; King George found no fault in him; and even the opposition kept its fire on the government for failing to support Cornwallis properly. If his reputation needed a shield it was found in the near universal respect for his probity.

  Cornwallis was under parole from the French privateer, but when the war with America ended, he felt free to accept, on 23 February 1786, the positions of governor-general and commander in chief of India. He demanded the positions be unified because he came to India as a broom, sweeping out corruption and choosing as his lieutenants Christian men of brilliance, dedication, and integrity. They were men like John Shore, an old Etonian, cricketer, classicist, and translator of Persian and Sanskrit, who came not to enrich himself in India but to serve the Indian people; William Jones, a lawyer, judge, and linguist who could speak thirteen languages fluently and get by in thirty more, and who appeared to know more about Hindu culture and history than the Hindus themselves; and Charles Grant, a friend of Shore’s, sharing many of Shore’s virtues and adding to them a masterful knowledge of the commercial workings of the East India Company. Together, they set the Hindu and Muslim legal codes into English, codified a general legal code for British India (the “Cornwallis Code”), and tried to ensure that the justice system lived up to its name (and abolished some of the harsher bits like mutilation as punishment). While they could not abolish slavery, which was still too popular in India, they did threaten to prosecute slave traders and prevent the selling of children. They established India’s currency, reformed its system of taxation, founded a Sanskrit college for Hindus (still in existence), and, on the whole, followed Cornwallis’s admonition that “whilst we call ourselves sovereign of the country we cannot leave the lives, liberty, & property of our subjects unprotected.”11 It is true, as his modern critics will be quick to point out, that Cornwallis established a color bar, requiring that officers and civil servants be not only gentlemen but white gentlemen. His reasons were simple. He thought European men were, in general, more likely to be disinterested and honest and that in the myriad of races, religions, and castes in India only a white man was capable of winning universal authority and respect.

  Arms and the Man

  “His appearance gave the impression of nobility of soul, magnanimity, and strength of character; his manner seemed to say, ‘I have nothing with which to reproach myself, I have done my duty, and I held out as long as possible.’”

  Baron Ludwig von Closen of the Franco-American forces after Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, quoted in Burke Davis, The Campaign that Won America: The Story of Yorktown (Eastern Acorn Press, 1997), p. 272

  Cornwallis, nevertheless, certainly treated the Indians with respect. A large part of his job was diplomatic (he sent the first Englishman to Tibet). British India at the time was centered on Calcutta, and much of the subcontinent remained in the hands of a variety of rajahs, the residual Mughal empire, the Mahrattas, and others. Cornwallis managed to keep the English peace with one significant exception, when he was called upon to unsheathe his sword against the sultan of Mysore, who was invading neighboring states (and who would eventually be overthrown by Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington). In these campaigns, Cornwallis proved a master of tactics and logistics (he was the first English commander to see that elephants were the perfect transport animals for artillery) and brought as allies the Mahrattas and the Nizam of Hyderabad. It is, incidentally, a myth that the eighteenth-century English had a huge technological advantage over their Indian adversaries. In fact, the troops of the sultan of Mysore were at least as well equipped, if not better, than the English. They were, however, neither as disciplined, nor as dogged, nor as well led (some of their officers were French), and the sultan was forced to negotiate a peace.

  Cornwallis might not have looked like a soldier to some—he looked more like a portly, grey-haired grandfather—but he certainly conducted himself like one, oblivious to the ping of musket rounds, manifestly competent in his duties, and magnanimous in donating prize money to his troops. He returned to England in 1793, where he was appointed to relatively trifling diplomatic and military duties, including acting as master general of ordnance. In 1798, however, he was sent to do for Ireland what he had done for India. He again combined a political and military role as lord-lieutenant and commander in chief. He put down Irish rebels, staved off a French landing,
and in the end, as he noted, found himself the surprised recipient of popular acclaim in Dublin—“Not an unpleasant circumstance to a man who had governed a country above two years by martial law.”12 With Lord Castlereagh he had pushed for and won the Act of Union between Ireland and Great Britain. Union, he thought, was the only hope to bring good government to the Emerald Isle, but union should be concurrent with Catholic emancipation: “Until the Catholics are admitted into a general participation of rights, there will be no peace or safety in Ireland.”13 When the king refused to emancipate the Catholics, Cornwallis resigned.

  He returned to diplomatic service, negotiating the peace of Amiens, a brief respite in the Napoleonic wars, and then was reappointed governor-general of India, a post he did not want, and in which he died on 5 October 1805. Like the true servant of empire that he was, he was buried in India (in a grave still maintained by the Indian government) and a monument to his memory was erected in St. Paul’s. As one of his biographers has written, “For sound advice and difficult duties, Cornwallis was the man to be approached. He was always ready to do his duty.... If a single man had to be chosen to illustrate the noblest features of the aristocratic ideal in the eighteenth century it might be Cornwallis. He was a true patriot.”14

  Part III

  IRELAND AND JOHN BULL’S OTHER EUROPEAN ISLANDS

  Chapter 7

  THE SHAMROCK AND THE ROCK

  “Ireland, the under-developed country of no importance except when rebelling or invaded. . . . ”

  —Norman Lloyd Williams, Sir Walter Raleigh1

  The central fact of Irish history is that Ireland is an appendage of England. Granted, the Irish have not seen it as such—and in their exhaustion with the place, the English have long since surrendered that view. But if England is the cockpit of Great Britain, Ireland is the Lesser Britain (which is how it was known to the ancients) of the British Isles. For most of its history, England regarded Ireland as an uncongenial, barbarous, and mystifying colony—but one necessary for the defense of the realm, because it was an all too convenient jumping-off point for possible invasions. At first the worry was the Spanish or the French or the Jacobites, but the threat continued through both twentieth-century World Wars, in which Ireland played less than stellar roles. In World War I, German U-boats tried to smuggle arms to the Irish rebels; and the farcical, if it hadn’t been so tragic, Easter Rebellion of 1916 came while Britain was being bled white in the trenches defending the rule of law in Europe. In World War II, while Great Britain stood at one point alone against the forces of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, the Japanese militarists, Vichy France, and their allies, the bravely neutral Irish Republic dallied with Adolf Hitler, the Irish Republican Army openly allied itself with the Nazis, and it took all the forbearance British Prime Minister Winston Churchill could muster not to act on rumors that German U-boats were using western Irish ports.

  * * *

  Did you know?

  The original Norman English invasion of Ireland was approved by the pope—and came at the request of an Irish king

  In the nineteenth century, the Irish always formed a disproportionately large percentage of the British army—both officers and enlisted ranks

  The idea of an Irish republic came from England

  * * *

  There is much to admire about the Irish, but it is also easy to see why the English, when not regarding them as comical, tended to see them as shiftless, ignorant, stubborn, contumacious, and cruel—though the cruelty cut both ways, for the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland found it simple to justify extraordinary measures against such a race as the Irish, and the Protestant Orangemen of Ulster, as much as the seething nationalists of the South, gave support to Rudyard Kipling’s observation that Ireland’s second religion was hate.2

  The Arrival of the English

  It is important to note that the centuries-long conflict between England and Ireland is not primarily a religious one. Religion is merely another shillelagh with which the two sides bash each other. The Catholic faith came to Ireland through an Englishman, St. Patrick, whom Irish raiders kidnapped and enslaved, though Patrick refused to hold that against them. He made the Irish Christians and toppled the old Druidic religion.3

  When the Englishmen came again, it was in 1169, and many of them spoke French, because they were Normans. The invasion, under the authority of King Henry II of England, was actually made at the request of the ousted Irish king of Leinster, Dermot MacMurrough (Ireland had a plethora of petty kings who were occasionally united under a High King of Ireland). MacMurrough pledged fealty to Henry and so was allowed to recruit an army in Wales. Included in that army was his future son-in-law, the Earl of Pembroke, Richard de Clare, known as Strongbow—one of the first English villains in Irish history, because he had the temerity to marry MacMurrough’s daughter and thus bind Ireland and England together. (The English have always regarded Irish colleens as attractive—a tribute few Irishmen appreciate.) MacMurrough is regarded as a traitor; one moniker for him is “Dermot of the foreigners.”

  MacMurrough’s campaign to recapture his kingdom—and make himself High King of Ireland—began well but was soon stymied by the armies of his rivals. He asked Strongbow to land with reinforcements, which meant not only Welshmen but Normans. The pope had a stake in the campaign as well, because a Norman invasion of Ireland meant a more Catholic Ireland. Irish law—the Brehon laws, adjudicated by a juridical class of brehons—remained pagan and countenanced things like divorce and bigamy; moreover, the Church in Ireland was conformed to Rome only insofar as it was conformed to Canterbury (some Irish bishops made a point of being consecrated there) because the Irish Church was corrupted by secular appointments and clerical indiscipline while the English Church was seen as orthodox.

  Though his men were few, Strongbow arrived and conquered Wexford, Waterford, and Dublin. In 1171, Henry II came with an army to check on things for himself. The Irish kings accepted him as their overlord, “the Lord of Ireland,” as did the bishops, and the pope confirmed the sanctity of the English invasion. So if the English are interlopers in Ireland, they are interlopers whose interloping began in the twelfth century—a fairly long historical stake—and with the blessing of the pope.

  Despite the arrival of Norman law and order, Ireland remained a strife-torn place—in part because the Normans conformed themselves to many Irish customs and habits. Ireland had never been united, and it remained a land of disparate parts, many of which, in the north and west, remained untouched by the Normans. Subsequent Norman invasions were the doing of enterprising knights who created their own feudal estates that were only later recognized by the Crown.

  The Celts Didn’t Have a Word for It

  In 1921, during negotiations over the creation of an Irish republic, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George (a Welshman who could speak Welsh) reminded the Irish nationalist and Gaelic extremist Eamon de Valera that the Celts had never had a word for “a republic”—it was an idea given to them by the English.

  The conversation is quoted in Thomas Jones, Whitehall Diary: Ireland, 1918—1925, ed. Keith Middlemas (Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 89

  Still, Ireland clearly benefited from Catholic Norman law, where it was imposed, dismantling the vagaries of paganism. The Irish gained other benefits too from their colonization by the English. A year after the Magna Carta was promulgated in England (1215) it became law in Ireland. Before the end of the thirteenth century (1297), Ireland had a parliament of its own.

  Going Native

  The triumph of English language and law, however, proved deceptive, for not only did the Irish find themselves a part of a greater Gaelic revival, of which the “gallowglasses”—Scotch mercenaries from the Highlands and western isles of Scotland, often the descendants of Vikings—were the sword arm, but the old Norman feudal lords swiftly became culturally Irish themselves. Laws might be passed prohibiting intermarriage, or requiring the supremacy of English language and law, but in truth, the sod of Ireland
was fast slipping from a distracted England. Even in “the Pale,” the Dublin-centered seat of English authority in Ireland, Irish customs and language were repealing those of England, in practice, if not in juridical rulebooks. The English made feeble attempts to rid the Irish of their recidivist barbarisms, but it was not until the arrival of the Tudor Dynasty (1485–1603) that the Crown began to take things in hand.

  Under Henry VII (who reigned from 1485 to 1509), “Poynings’ Law” was promulgated, making all acts of the Irish parliament subordinate and subject to the approval of the English parliament; and this time, English supremacy was meant to stick. More serious, though, was King Henry VIII’s declaration of himself as head of the Church in England. When this led to an Irish rebellion by the Fitzgeralds, to whom successive English monarchs had delegated authority in Ireland, it was crushed. Henry VIII declared himself not only head of the English Church but King of Ireland and pressed all Irish kings to submit. In exchange, he would give them English titles and full English rights. The Irish assented, but in an Irish way: they took what benefited them from the law and planned to ignore it whenever it collided with convenience.

  Men without Shoes

  An example of Gaelic barbarism, of a minor sort, can be seen in a painting (made in 1594) of Sir Thomas Lee, an English officer in Ireland. His upper half is dressed in English finery, but his bottom half is barelegged and barefooted in the appalling Irish style—highlighting the unsettling ways Englishmen could go native, and reminding all men to this day that legs belong in pants and feet belong in shoes.