He was sent to a school full of Catholics and embraced Catholic emancipation, which later stood him in good stead with his troops, who were overwhelmingly Irish. Commissioned at the age of twelve in the regiment of Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, his actual service began at age seventeen and saw him putting down Irish rebels, occasionally serving as an aide-de-camp, and clashing with the French in Portugal and Spain (from 1808 to 1812) in the Peninsular War where his brothers saw service and were wounded with him. Of one battle, Napier remarked, “George was hit in the stern and I in the stem. That was burning the family candle at both ends.”6 When he was shot in the face, he had the presence of mind, while carried away on a stretcher, to wave his hat in salute to Wellington.
The Paths of Glory Lead but to the Grave—Hurrah!
“Who would be buried by a sexton in a churchyard rather than by an army in the hour of victory?”
General Sir Charles Napier, quoted in Colonel Sir William F. Butler, Sir Charles Napier (Cornell University Library Digital Collections, no date, reprint of Macmillan’s 1894 edition), p. 101
He had brief stops in Bermuda, in the War of 1812, at a military college in England, and on the Continent after Napoleon escaped Elba. In 1818, he was made inspecting field officer of the Ionian Islands, then under British possession, and toured Greece where he, unofficially, advised Greek rebels in their fight against the Ottoman Turks (he liked the Greeks because they reminded him of the Irish). In 1822, he was made Military President of Cephalonia, the largest of the Ionian Islands. It was one of those peculiar imperial postings that suit peculiar geniuses. In Cephalonia, he acted as a sort of king and put into action a program of civil engineering works that had him draining marshes, building roads, constructing bridges, and generally tidying up the place with manic Victorian energy. He fathered two daughters with a wild young Greek woman named Anastasia. When he left Cephalonia, he left her too, though he provided money to her, her parents, and his daughters, and took custody of the latter when Anastasia abandoned them and married a Greek. It was also while he was reigning over Cephalonia that he met Byron, who nearly convinced him to take command of the Greek rebel forces against the Turks. His happy days in Cephalonia ended when Major-General Sir Frederick Adam became high commissioner for the islands. Napier, who found few superiors to his liking, immediately fell into a blistering dispute with Adam and lost his post in 1830. He was offered another Ionian island, Zante, but turned it down. His Greek idyll was over.
Napier, the Soldier as Diplomat
“As to the people of every part of Germany, honour to Caesar for killing so many of them; stupid, slow, hard animals, they have not even so much tact as to cheat well.”
Quoted in Lieutenant-General Sir William Napier, The Life and Opinions of General Sir Charles James Napier, G.C.B. (John Murray, 1857), vol. I, p. 346
So apparently was his career. He rejected a posting to Canada (too cold for his wife, a semi-invalid widow more than a decade his senior) and a governorship in Australia (by which time he was widowed himself). Had he gone to Australia—and he came to regret that he had not—Napier would have assured “that the usual Anglo-Saxon method of planting civilisation by robbery, oppression, murder, and extermination of natives should not take place under his government.” Instead, on half pay, he lived in exile in France writing books. Still, he was promoted and knighted (and remarried) and in 1838 was returned to active duty in the North of England. His duty was unsympathetic. Amongst the urban, industrial poor, he had to guard against riots by the Chartists—a radical movement of political reform, whose goals (including universal manhood suffrage) he supported, even if he could not support the Chartist leaders (whom he called “demagogues of evil”) or their violent methods. He was contemptuous of the Whigs (the liberals), for their truckling to the mob, and fearful of a possible Tory crackdown. Though he did his duty well, the work was, he felt, morally debilitating: “A man is easily reconciled to act against a misled people if he has an honest plan of his own; but if he is only a servant of greater knaves than those he opposes, and feels he is giving strength to injustice, he loses the right stimulus to action.”7
Peccavi
In 1841 he was rescued by an invitation to command in India. He did not immediately accept—India, he thought, was no place for his wife or his daughters—but the chance for military glory was always a great goad to him, and there were mercenary reasons as well: “All I want is to catch all the rupees for my girls; and then die like a gentleman.”8 But once in harness he was less concerned about dying like a gentleman than in the marvelous prospect of leading troops to victory. He had his opportunity in Sind, a southern gateway from India to Afghanistan. Britain had a treaty with the emirs (the Baluchi rulers of Sind), but the emirs had not abided by it, and they were certainly opposed to the more stringent treaty that Napier was empowered to present them. Napier despised the emirs and looked forward to annexing Sind, because “Peace and civilization will then replace war and barbarism. My conscience shall be light for I see no wrong in so regulating a set of tyrants who...have in sixty years nearly destroyed the country.”9
Better Us than Them
“They are tyrants, and so are we, but the poor will have a fairer play under our sceptre than under theirs.... We have no right to seize Scinde, yet we shall do so, and a very advantageous, useful, humane piece of rascality it shall be.”
General Sir Charles Napier on the prospect of toppling the emirs of Sind, quoted in Byron Farwell, Eminent Victorian Soldiers: Seekers of Glory (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), p. 85
His blood up—and expecting the emirs to strike—he struck first at the Battle of Meanee; or, actually, the first thing he struck was the head of a native beating a camel (cruelty to animals, of course, being something that no Englishman can tolerate). With that hand throbbing with pain (and holding his horse’s reins), his other gripping his father’s sword, the sixty-year-old general led his men into battle outnumbered ten to one, and brought them charging to victory in fierce hand-to-hand combat; a battalion (almost entirely Irish) of the 22nd Regiment cheered him during the action and after, which became one of his proudest memories. Having defeated more than 22,000 Baluchis at Meanee (17 February 1843), a month later he smashed another 26,000 at the Battle of Hyderabad (24 March 1843) and sealed his conquest, immortalized by Punch with the caption “Peccavi” (Latin for “I have sinned”), which is what much liberal opinion in England believed Napier had done. Everything Napier did was steeped in political controversy, but his conquest of Sind, which was duly annexed, was undeniably a first-class bit of soldiering.
The Napier Way
“The great receipt for quieting a country is a good thrashing first and great kindness afterwards: the wildest chaps are thus tamed.”
General Sir Charles Napier, quoted in Lieutenant-General Sir William Napier, The Life and Opinions of General Sir Charles James Napier, G.C.B. (John Murray, 1857), vol. III, p. 34
Even better, having shattered the power of the emirs (who had dreamt of parading Napier in chains), he was given Sind to govern: “Now I shall work at Sind as in Cephalonia, to do good, to create, to improve, to end destruction and raise up order.”10 Napier’s justice was not impartial; he made it a rule always to favor the poor. His sharp sense of irony and mordant humor usually saved him from platitudes, but not always. Sometimes his liberalism got the better of him, as in this peroration:People think, and justly sometimes, that to execute the law is the great thing; they fancy this to be justice. Cast away details, good man, and take what the people call justice, not what the laws call justice, and execute that. Both legal and popular justice have their evils, but assuredly the people’s justice is a thousand times nearer to God’s justice. Justice must go with the people, not against the people; that is the way to govern nations, and not by square and compass.11
Which is all very well and good, but Napier, the champion of the people’s justice, later exclaimed—after a countryman killed Napier’s dog and a jur
y of the countryman’s peers refused to convict him—“Trial by jury is a farce!”12 So much for the people’s justice.
What really suited Napier was not the people’s justice, but Napier’s justice executed on the people’s behalf. Indeed, he often dreamt of unlimited power and what he would do with it, as a potentate of the East or dictator of Ireland, in which he would both champion freedom of the press—and hang editors who opposed him! But Napier’s justice could also be glorious, as when he abolished suttee, the Hindu tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Imposing the British Christian value on women—rather higher than the 200-rupee price he believed was the going rate for a woman in Sind—wasn’t easy: “There is only one crime I cannot put down—wife killing! They think to kill a cat or a dog is wrong, but I have hanged at least six for killing women: on the slightest quarrel she is chopped to pieces.... I will hang 200 unless they stop.”13 In part to make sure they did stop, his government was in essence a military government, staffed with fellow officers, because Napier distrusted old India hands among the civil servants—he thought them sleek careerists gone native. But he couldn’t buck them entirely because he was himself employed by the British East India Company, the de facto ruler of much of India. It was a relationship doomed to fail, not only given Napier’s inevitable impatience with restraint and superiors, but because of his utter contempt for men driven by profit rather than the martial virtues and the Napier vision of justice.
Napier credited his success in pacifying Sind to six factors: he put down crime; he showed the people who had fought against him that he respected their military prowess (a very British imperial notion this, that the best fighters against you are the ones you respect and want at your side); those who surrendered had their property restored to them (sometimes with interest); the poor were given justice; the emirs’ flunkeys were retained, though strictly supervised; and British power was made manifest so that it was clear that any rebellion would be instantly quashed.
The recipe was good, but his years governing Sind were not nearly so satisfying as those spent in Cephalonia (Napier once said that he “would rather have finished the roads in Cephalonia than have fought Austerlitz or Waterloo”14) and were tinged with disappointment (missing the First Sikh War), frustration with the East India Company bureaucracy, and tragedy (a cholera epidemic among whose victims was his nephew). In 1847, dogged by his old wounds and new disabilities and his wife’s ill health, he resigned and returned to England (after a recuperative period in the South of France).
Multiculturalism, Napier-Style
Napier to Brahmin priests protesting his ban on widow-burning: “This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation also has a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to our national customs.”
Quoted in Byron Farwell, Eminent Victorian Soldiers: Seekers of Glory (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), pp. 93–94
He wasn’t home long. When news of the Battle of Chillianwala (13 January 1849 in the Second Sikh War) reached England as either a narrow, costly victory or an embarrassing setback, there was a clamor for a new commander to succeed General Sir Hugh Gough. The Duke of Wellington, against the fervent opposition of the East India Company, recommended Napier, telling him finally, “If you don’t go, I must.”15 Napier went. But by the time he arrived, gallant old Sir Hugh (himself sixty-nine years old) had recovered matters and pounded the Sikhs into submission and the Punjab was annexed to Britain (as Napier thought should have been done at the end of the First Sikh War). The Sikhs then became among the best and most loyal troops the British had.
Napier, having missed the action, nevertheless arrived as commander in chief for India. Inevitably, having first struck up a liking for the governor-general Lord Dalhousie, he chafed under his supervision, and resigned his command in 1850. Napier died in England in 1853. He provided his own best epitaph towards the end of his service in India, when he dreamt of returning home, writing that he would look at his “father’s sword, and think of the day he gave it into my young hands, and of the motto on a Spanish blade he had, ‘Draw me not without cause; put me not up without honour.’ I have not drawn his sword without cause, nor put it up without honour.”16 Indeed not—and while Napier’s justice might have been idiosyncratic and rough and ready, to his mind it was the administration of such justice that vindicated the British Empire and that made him, in good conscience, its military servant.
Part IV
INDIA
Chapter 11
THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN
The British East India Company (or John Company, in its popular moniker), was the sort of company you’d like to work for—it had its own army, its own navy, its own Anglican church, its own courts, its own ambassadors and civil service, and it governed a fifth of the world’s population. It was a curiosity and a wonder, as was recognized even at the time by such observers as Thomas Babington Macaulay, member of Parliament, man of letters, and one of the most important figures in the shaping of British India. He had it precisely right when he addressed the House of Commons in 1833:It is strange, very strange, that a joint-stock society of traders . . . should be intrusted with the sovereignty of a larger population, the disposal of a larger clear revenue, the command of a larger army, than are under the direct management of the Executive Government of the United Kingdom. But what constitution can we give to our Indian Empire which shall not be strange.... That Empire is itself the strangest of all political anomalies. That a handful of adventurers from an island in the Atlantic should have subjugated a vast country divided from the place of their birth by half the globe; a country which at no very distant period was merely the subject of fable to the nations of Europe; a country never before violated by the most renowned of Western conquerors; a country which Trajan never entered; a country lying beyond the point where the phalanx of Alexander refused to proceed; that we should govern a territory ten thousand miles from us, a territory larger and more populous than France, Spain, Italy, and Germany put together, a territory, the present clear revenue of which exceeds the present clear revenue of any state in the world, France excepted; a territory inhabited by men differing from us in race, colour, language, manners, morals, religion; these are prodigies to which the world has seen nothing similar. Reason is confounded. We interrogate the past in vain. General rules are useless where the whole is one vast exception. The Company is an anomaly; but it is part of a system where every thing is anomaly. It is the strangest of all governments; but it is designed for the strangest of all empires.1
* * *
Did you know?
Yale University is named after a merchant of the British East India Company (who also happened to govern an Indian province)
Mohandas Gandhi praised the British Empire
India is a democracy because of the British Empire
* * *
The British East India Company Defined
“How was the East India Company controlled? By the government. What was its object? To collect taxes. How was this object attained? By means of a large standing army. What were its employees? Soldiers, mostly, the rest, civil servants. Where did it trade to? China. What did it export from England? Courage. What did it import? Tea!”
Dr. (and eventually Major) C. Northcote Parkinson (of Parkinson’s Law fame), quoted in Brian Gardner, The East India Company (Dorset Press, 1971), p. 11
This strangest of all empires is what most people now think of when they think of the British Empire—they think of the British Raj, the jewel in the crown, pig-sticking and curry, Kipling and the Great Game, railroads and vast white palaces, tea and polo, sunburnt majors and sundowners on the verandah. It was all that and more. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be a Briton in India—if you survived the tropical diseases, the mutiny, the Thugs, and the rebellious tribesmen�
�was very heaven. And it all started with a merchant company granted a royal charter in 1600 by Queen Elizabeth. The East India Company sought trade throughout East Asia, particularly the Spice Islands, and competed (and fought) against rival merchant powers, including the Portuguese and the Dutch; later, the French and even the Danes and the Swedes (in the eighteenth century) were involved.
An American in India
The American-born Elihu Yale (1649–1721)—the financial benefactor who left his name to Yale College (now Yale University)—spent twenty years in the British East India Company and was governor of Madras.
India was ruled (for the most part) by the Islamic Mughal Empire whose emperors—Turko-Mongol by blood, Persian by culture, governing a largely Hindu people—granted British merchants trading rights and the right to establish outposts on the Indian subcontinent. The British were not the first to have such footholds: Portugal had been on the subcontinent for a century and the Dutch for a few years before the British. Over the course of the seventeenth century British outposts came to include Surat, Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta. It was England’s jolly King Charles II who gave the East India Company a new charter that set it on its unique course, granting it virtually unlimited powers to trade, govern, and expand its Indian holdings. Seventy years later, long after the crown had shifted from the Stuarts to the House of Hanover, an unlikely hero took full advantage of what King Charles had ordained.
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire Page 12
