The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire

by H. W. Crocker, III

  For three years he drove himself hard, reinforcing his conquests, dispatching subordinates to smash French or Dutch upstarts, militarily defending the cowardly, corrupt, and conniving new nawab of Bengal against all rivals (while not backing him too much, knowing how conniving he was), and solidifying Britain’s hold on most of India. It was demanding work, but financially rewarding. When he returned to England in 1760, Clive was an extraordinarily wealthy man.

  An Empire Built by Veracity More Than Valor

  “English valour and English intelligence have done less to extend and preserve our Oriental empire than English veracity. All that we could have gained by imitating the dou-blings, the evasions, the fictions, the perjuries which have been employed against us, is as nothing, when compared with what we have gained by being the one power in India on whose word reliance can be placed.”

  Lord Macaulay, Essay on Clive (Longmans’ English Classics, Longmans, Green and Co., 1928), pp. 56–57

  Ennobled but Not Respected

  In India, he was regarded as an invincible soldier and an authoritative lawgiver. In England, while he entered Parliament (and eventually became Baron Clive of Plassey), he proved inept as a politician (the cynicism he learned in Indian politics being readily ridiculed as lack of principle) and was quickly dismissed as a typical nabob—all new wealth and no finer qualities. It seems poor recompense for a man who had been inarguably heroic in his battles in India; but he also feuded with the directors of the East India Company, which made him appear a man primarily motivated by pecuniary self-interest, though this was not true. Clive was generous with his family, he purchased estates, but for all the wealth he obtained, it seems clear that wealth itself was never his object. Clive was driven much more by a yearning after greatness, for himself and for his country.

  How valuable he was in India became manifest after his departure. Muslims and Hindus who had accepted Clive as a disinterested lawgiver were appalled by the new administration of Henry Vansittart, which seemed driven by greed and was utterly incompetent at keeping the balances of power Clive had maintained between rival Indian rulers. The result was insurrection, mutiny, and war; and while British arms won the day as usual, there was only one man who could restore the political order of Bengal: Clive.

  Winning his power struggle against the chairman of the company, Clive returned to India in 1765 as governor with full power to restore the Pax Britannica, root out corruption, and revive the Company’s fortunes. All this he did with an ardor as if to prove that he was an idealist after all and devoted to the honor of England. He received from the Mughal of India official title for Britain’s holdings on the subcontinent, he reformed the civil service, and he restructured the army. In 1757, with British India furbished and solidified, he returned to England.

  But after every such whirlwind of activity Clive paid a price. For all his cool-headedness in battle, his clear-sighted ability to navigate Indian politics, the forcible energies of his personality—once he was expended, he collapsed into depression of a deep and shocking sort, worsened by occasional recurrences of malaria. Though reunited with his wife, and blessed with a happy marriage, Clive found England a gloomy place. In India, he was the man who would be king; in England he was a second-rater: useful abroad, but otherwise a trumped-up parvenu. Indeed, his enemies in the Company and in parliament conspired to portray Clive as avaricious, plundering, and worthy of censure, and used an outbreak of famine in Bengal (caused by drought) as an excuse to excoriate him. In 1772, he took to the floor of the House of Commons to defend himself and did so with an outburst of oratory that astonished his listeners (for he was not known as a speaker). A parliamentary committee investigated him, and during the investigation he made his most famous statement about the riches that had been held out before him after the Battle of Plassey: “An opulent city lay at my mercy. Its richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles. I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone, piled on either hand with gold and jewels. By God, Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation.”7 His final appeal to the House was “leave me my honour, take away my fortune!”8 Clive was vindicated by parliamentary vote in 1773, but only after the most dreadful attacks had been made upon him.

  Advice to a Young Nobleman from King George II

  “If he wants to learn the art of war, let him go to Clive!”

  Quoted in Mark Bence-Jones, Clive of India (Book Club Associates, London, 1974), p. 169

  In 1774, in the midst of depression, a severe cold, and recurrent, debilitating stomach pain, he died—though whether of apoplexy, or from an accidental overdose of laudanum, or of a pen knife stabbed into his throat (either by himself or by someone else) is unclear. He was forty-nine and was buried in an unmarked grave in an English church in the small village of Moreton Saye, near where he was born and near to Market Drayton, to whose shopkeepers he and his small gang of child ruffians had threatened broken windows. If the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, the Battle of Plassey was won on the streets of Market Drayton. Clive had, at last, truly returned home.

  Chapter 13

  GEORGE CURZON, 1ST MARQUESS CURZON OF KEDLESTON (1859–1925)

  “My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,

  I am a most superior person,

  My cheek is pink, my hair is sleek,

  I dine at Blenheim once a week.”

  —a bit of doggerel presumed to have been written by two of Curzon’s contemporaries at Balliol College, Oxford1

  The four lines above are the most quoted lines about Lord Curzon. He was indeed a most superior person, addressing his fellow members of Parliament as “a divinity addressing black beetles.” 2 He was perhaps the most widely traveled man of his day: through Europe, the Levant, Central Asia, and the Far and Near East most especially (writing massive volumes on Russia and Central Asia, the Near East, and the Far East). His father, in fact, once asked him, “Why don’t you stay at home and be quiet?”3 That had been the Curzon way for centuries, a noble family without ambition. But George Curzon, while a conservative in politics (and in many of his tastes; he was a great conservator, for instance, in matters architectural), could restrain neither his ambition, nor his self-improving travels, nor his eager and witty tongue. Arrogant, he was nevertheless charming. He cut a swath through women, though never violating his gentleman’s code of not behaving like a bounder, never despoiling a maiden, and restricting himself, more or less, to the aristocratic wives of complaisant husbands (as was the case with one of the great loves of Curzon’s life, Sibell, Lady Grosvenor, whose husband Lord Grosvenor was “a fragile epileptic whose chief passion was steam engines”4 rather than his wife).

  * * *

  Did you know?

  Curzon worked to conserve and restore Indian architecture (including the Taj Mahal)

  He was an early environmentalist in India

  Curzon believed that Britain stripped of its empire would be “a sort of glorified Belgium”

  * * *

  His arrogance had been with him since his schooldays (at Eton and before), in which he was often contemptuous of his instructors, preferring to teach himself—and then humiliating his ignored tutors by scooping up all the academic prizes. He could, from this description, easily be seen as a snooty, sophisticated, rank (albeit high-rank) bastard that women might love (because they do rather like that kind) but that men despise. Yet that would be to take away the wrong impression. No one ever doubted Curzon’s self-regard—but they also didn’t doubt his talent, or his industry, or, for that matter, his creativity, his wit, and his loyalty in friendship. He was never short of sincere and devoted friends.

  Though born to wealth and position at Kedleston Hall, he was raised by sadistic governesses and a father more famous for removing unnecessary coal from fires than for any warm paternal affection. Though energetic, Curzon lived in pain all his adult life because of a riding injury that forced him to wear a metal back brace. The greatest shock of
his young life was not that injury, but instead taking a second-class rather than a first-class degree in the second half of his classics course at Oxford (divided into “Mods” and “Greats”; he had taken a first in “Mods”)—a shortfall he redressed by setting himself to win two prestigious academic prizes, which he did, and a fellowship to All Souls.

  His ultimate goal was not academic, but political. In 1885 he became private secretary to the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, leader of the Conservative Party. In 1886, he entered Parliament himself, though he seemed far less interested in constituency matters than in his global travels. In 1895, he married an American, Mary Leiter, heiress to a department store fortune; their engagement was kept secret for two years, during which time she rarely saw him or heard from him, so that he could undertake dangerous travels in the East. He then settled into work in the new Conservative government as the parliamentary under-secretary for foreign affairs. In 1898, the thirty-nine-year-old Curzon became viceroy of India.

  Great Moments in British Imperial History

  In 1894, during a singular visit to the Northwest Frontier, in the region of the Pamir Mountains, along the Oxus River, Curzon came riding along the grassy plains of Mastuj and was overcome with an overwhelming desire for a beer. As the desire waxed he saw in the distance a horseman bearing towards him. The man pulled rein just before Curzon, identified himself as the servant of Captain Francis Younghusband, and held out a bottle of Bass Ale.

  The Great Viceroy

  Curzon, whose global travels put him in a position to make apt comparisons, judged the British Empire “under Providence, the greatest instrument for good that the world has seen.”5 In India, he set about immediately to make sure that such a judgment could be main- tained. He reformed and improved the already high standards of the Indian Civil Service; created an imperial cadet corps to provide military training and special commissions for Indian princes; and worked assiduously to reconcile the tribes of the northwest frontier and block Russian penetration into British areas of influence. An ardent imperialist in foreign policy, he was a paternalist in domestic policy and saw his role as helping to improve the lot of the Indians. He also devoted himself to his architectural passion, most especially the restoration of the Taj Mahal, which he adored.

  Aristocrat that he was, he felt a kinship with the poor (noblesse oblige) and with the native aristocracy, but disdain for the Indian commercial classes and most especially the Babus, the educated Indians of Bengal, who were full of fruity, overblown rhetoric and personal and nationalistic aspirations that he opposed. Still, he was India’s defender, both in his relations with the British government and in his belief in the value of its ancient civilization. If the British position was to be justified, Britons in India had to behave with honesty and justice; if they didn’t they would be punished; and Curzon made no exceptions for British merchants, planters, or soldiers. Like many Englishmen, he respected Islam, though he was less certain of Hinduism. He was an opponent of Christian missionaries, thinking them meddlesome and unhelpful to the Empire. Macaulay had wanted to create a class of Indian Englishmen. Curzon wanted to leave Indian civilization alone and govern through the British Raj and the native aristocracy. In this, he felt, there was stability, order, and a hope for continuity and permanence in maintaining British India.

  He built more railroads than any other governor-general (or viceroy) in India. He advanced agrarian reforms to help Indian peasants maintain their land. He promoted massive new irrigation projects, hoping to prevent a replay of the horrific famine that followed the drought of 1899. He toured every hospital he could find, generally pleased at the efforts of British doctors and civil servants and unimpressed by the fatalistic attitude of the native Indian officials.

  The Viceroy on His Charge

  “I do not see how any Englishman contrasting India as it is now with what it was, and would certainly have been under any other conditions than British rule, can fail to see that we came and have stayed here under no blind or capricious impulse, but in obedience to what some (of whom I am one) would call the decree of Providence, others the law of destiny—in any case for the lasting benefit of millions of the human race. We often make great mistakes here: we are sometimes hard, and insolent, and overbearing: we are a good deal strangled with red tape. But none the less, I do firmly believe that there is no Government in the world (and I have seen most) that rests on so secure a moral basis, or that is more freely animated by duty.”

  Curzon, viceroy of India, in a letter to John Morley, Liberal member of Parliament (and a future secretary of state for India), in the summer of 1900, quoted in David Gilmour, Curzon: Imperial Statesman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p.166

  It became his habit to work himself into a state of physical collapse—in part because he thought he could do everyone’s job better himself, and proceeded to do so; in part because of his physical disabilities, most particularly his bad back, which suffered from the overwork and lack of exercise; and in part because when he was bedridden he could accomplish even more, writing letters, dispatches, and reports, so collapse could be considered a positive good to a man who wanted to be judged by what he had achieved for the Indians. He meant to achieve a lot—so much, in fact, that when his name was bruited about as a potential foreign secretary or even prime minister, he poohed-poohed the suggestion. His path to achievement was as viceroy of India.

  Curzon was an Orientalist—he loved Asia, and wanted it preserved in all its rough, exotic glory, and he spent enormous amounts of time, money, and effort restoring historic Indian buildings—even booting Britons out in the process. India’s historical architecture had no better friend than Curzon. He was also something of a conservationist, showing a rare concern for the preservation of Indian wildlife.

  Running through all this was Curzon’s belief in British aristocrats running India with the assistance of Indian aristocrats who, if they went to Oxford or Cambridge, would only return to India despising their own people and picking up the worst habits a wealthy young man could pick up in such surroundings—an excessive taste for drink and a proclivity for dissipation. Curzon preferred princes on elephants to princes gambling in Monte Carlo and maintaining European mistresses. He considered it part of his duty to lecture the princes on their family affairs—and, as might be surmised, he was very fond of lecturing other people. While Curzon believed in the cult of the English gentleman and saw Christianity as an important source of Western superiority, he did not believe that Christianity was an exportable commodity or that Indian princes should be English gentlemen rather than Indian ones. It was to this end that Curzon reformed the Indian colleges and set up an Indian officer-training program. The princes were still taught English ways and tastes, but at least they learned them in India, and military training and discipline was the one way to shore up the moral fibre of princes who might otherwise unravel with wine, women, and song.

  While Curzon remained a mighty force in India—when his wife fell sick in England he received messages of sympathy from all the Indian princes—his abortive second term as viceroy (1904–05) helped to ruin his reputation. Curzon authorized the administrative partition of Bengal—a province designed by British line-drawers and now amended by them, but to the dismay of the Bengalis, who had taken fiercely to the “nationality” given them by the British; they would not have it redrawn away, and the new lines were eventually scrapped (in 1911). More immediately important to Curzon was his conflict with the new commander in chief of the Indian Army, Lord Kitchener. Kitchener successfully conspired against Curzon to concentrate all military authority in his own hands (stripping it from the Military Member of the Viceroy’s Council, who represented the Military Department and acted as both an adviser to the Viceroy and the commander in chief). In consequence, Curzon resigned.

  An Empire of Good Taste

  “After every other viceroy has been forgotten, Curzon will be remembered because he restored all that was beautiful in India.”

  Jawa
harlal Nehru, first prime minister of independent India, quoted in Kenneth Rose, Curzon: A Most Superior Person (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), p. 239

  Righteous Viceroy

  “A hundred times in India have I said to myself, Oh that to every Englishman in this country, as he ends his work, might be truthfully applied the phrase, ‘Thou hast loved righteousness and hated iniquity.’ No man has, I believe, ever served India faithfully of whom that could not be said. All other triumphs are tinsel and sham.... I have worked for no other aim. Let India be my judge.”