Birds of Passage

by Henrietta Clive

  KRISHNA WODEYAR, Maharajah of Mysore

  At the fall of Seringapatam, the British put this young boy in place as ruler of Mysore.

  DHOONDHIA WAUGH

  This able Muslim brigand commander had many disgruntled men fighting under him in the early summer of 1800. In theory, he hoped for French aid to restore the government and country of Tipu to his sons. In reality, he planned to build a kingdom of his own in an area larger and more populous than the British Isles. He was defeated by Colonel Arthur Wellesley on August 20th 1800.

  SARABHOJI, Maharajah of Tanjore (ruled 1798–1832)

  The Maharajah Sarabhoji, an orphan, was raised by the Danish Missionary C. F. Schwartz, who founded a mission in Tanjore, educated the Maharajah Sarabhoji and helped him regain his throne. Henrietta was lavishly entertained in Tanjore; on her return to England, she took with her some of ‘the gentleman cows and their ladies’ which Sarabhoji had given her as a gift.

  Introduction

  ‘A ship came in yesterday that left England the beginning of March, but had no news, having left England without having gone to Portsmouth and having left all the passengers and brought their baggage, besides a poor woman who took her passage from Deal to Portsmouth. Think of anybody coming to the East Indies by mistake!’

  Lady Henrietta Clive, Madras, 1799

  On March 4th 1800, Lady Henrietta Clive took the first steps in the realisation of a dream. In fulfilment, as she put it, of ‘a most indescribable wish to go and see’ Seringapatam and whatever remained of Tipu Sultan’s world, she set forth on a seven-month excursion into South India that would cover over one thousand miles. Accompanying her were her daughters, Harriet (Harry aged thirteen), Charlotte Florentia (Charly aged twelve) and an Italian artist, Signora Anna Tonelli. A Captain Brown commanded her bodyguard and baggage train. Fourteen elephants carried tents, as well as a harp, a pianoforte, and Henrietta’s one horse bandy. One hundred bullocks hauled provision carts; camels delivered express messages. Escorted by an enormous retinue of over seven hundred and fifty people, including sixty-six infantry, cooks, palanquin bearers, maids, hangers-on and her Persian teacher, Henrietta made her way over mountains and through ‘tygerish’ jungles and crocodile-infested rivers, camping for the most part along the route, studying her Persian verbs, searching for local flora and fauna, reviewing troops, visiting with East India Company officials and British military representatives, meeting polygars and fakeers, calling on the wives and older sons of Tipu Sultan, Ranees, Maharajahs, and even the Danish Commandant of Tranquebar. Henrietta did indeed visit Seringapatam, and ‘all the great horn, besides’, travelling the while, as she wrote to her friend Lady Frances Douglas, ‘not with seven leagued boots, but with elephants and camels like an Eastern Damsel with all possible dignity’.

  * * *

  My personal introduction to Lady Henrietta Clive came some years ago. Like my subject, I had recently been in South India. A strange curiosity led me to Powis Castle, Wales to have a look at the collection ‘Treasures from India: the Clive Collection’, acquired primarily by Lord Robert ‘Clive of India’, and later added to by his son, Lord Edward Clive, Governor of Madras, and daughter-in-law, Lady Henrietta. Although I found the artifacts to be interesting enough, it was Henrietta herself, a Welsh woman traveller, journeying to and within the interior of South India at the turn of a now-distant eighteenth and nineteenth century, who rather gripped my attention.

  By virtue of my own Indian journeys and projects I had acquired a certain eclectic familiarity with South India. My experiences were certainly varied and sometimes even happenstance. In Mysore, for example, I had the great good fortune to meet and converse with R. K. Narayan on several occasions. Sitting on his upstairs verandah, watching the changing colours of the sunset, listening to cicadas and the occasional chirp of a gecko and drinking milky sweet, South Indian coffee, we gossiped about his characters dwelling out there in the fictional world of Malgudi. Narayan conceived of the lives of his characters, all lives for that matter, as part of a continuous flow of coming together and parting. I had myself spent countless sultry, full-moon nights in isolated temples or under ancient trees observing the ritual healing dances of masked spirit dancers in South Kanara (once the Kingdom of Tuluva), a narrow strip of land along the Arabian coast of South India. The narratives recited by the dancers were odd and compelling tales of left-over-lifestill-to-live. After having seen the Powis Castle exhibit, I found myself musing about how Lady Henrietta Clive’s historical adventure in the East might contain its own inherently fascinating tales. Anxious to know more about her and her journey to, within and back home from the South India of that period, I took my first steps.

  A few weeks later while at home in West Texas, I rang the 7th Earl of Powis [George William Herbert, 1925–93] at Chirbury, introduced myself and asked where Lady Henrietta Clive’s India papers were held.

  ‘Her letters and a journal are at home in the castle,’ said the Earl of Powis, seemingly unperturbed by this unexpected call from West Texas. ‘Please speak more loudly, as I have difficulty hearing.’

  ‘Would it be possible for me to see them?’ I shouted obligingly.

  ‘Yes … but not today,’ he responded.

  We set a date when I would return to Powis Castle and left it at that.

  A light snow had fallen when I appeared once again in Wales.

  ‘It is too cold for you to work in the castle,’ said the Earl of Powis, a kind, scholarly man, as he looked me up and down. ‘You are so “wee” you might freeze to death.’ He then added decisively, ‘You must use my study at Marrington Hall.’

  So it was that I drove the narrow lanes to Marrington Hall in Chirbury from Shrewsbury each morning to examine, in the comfort of the Earl of Powis’s state-of-the-art, centrally heated study, several boxes of documents. At eleven o’clock he would bring me a cup of coffee and chat briefly about the Herbert family history and, in particular, its strong women. Around three o’clock, after a cup of tea, he would send me on my way before dark settled in on those short January days. In those moments in snowy Wales, indirectly, through the 7th Earl of Powis, I was welcomed aboard and accepted as a fellow traveller with Henrietta. Henrietta and I joined hands, as it were, both in her Welsh setting and her journey through South India. She led me into her story, rekindling in me the Indian sights and smells and sounds which so fascinated, and for a time, intoxicated her. In a different period, I, too, had breathed and looked at that air.

  Henrietta’s words, written in an eighteenth-century script of now faded ink, were often difficult to decipher. The Earl of Powis encouraged me to use his Xerox machine to copy whatever documents I wished. When my schedule did not permit me time enough to finish going through the papers, he allowed me to come for another visit before he relinquished the boxes to the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth.

  Certainly Henrietta’s journalistic narrative is not wholly unlikely for the times. For example, Mrs Eliza Fay, thought to have been the daughter of a sailor, sailed to India on three separate journeys and wrote letters about her experiences. Her first voyage was in 1779 with her East India Company lawyer-husband, who was going out to practise as an Advocate at the Supreme Court of Calcutta. Of Mrs Fay’s letters the liveliest and most interesting one was written on her initial trip out when she was held captive by Haidar Ali on the West coast of India in Calicut. After divorcing her husband, who had run off with another woman, Mrs Fay sailed again to Calcutta on her own in 1784 and a final time in 1815. She died in 1816 in Calcutta; her letters were published in 1817. Two years after Henrietta had returned to England, in 1803, Mrs Maria Graham, daughter of Rear Admiral George Dundas, sailed with her husband, a Captain in the Navy, to India. Her collected Indian letters, Journal of a Residence in India (published in 1813) offer a more refined and educated voice than Mrs Fay. However, Mrs Graham did not seem particularly to enjoy India. Her knowledge of it was fairly circumscribed, dealing for the most part with port calls to Bombay, Ceylon and Ma
dras.

  Henrietta’s narrative is unique, precisely because it bears the voice of Henrietta’s letters and journal from the interior of South India. Prior to her adventurous trek, western travellers in this little-travelled region had been, for the most part, the British military, various foreign missionaries and East India Company representatives, although two British artists, Thomas Daniell (1749–1840) and his nephew, William (1769–1837), had toured South India in 1792, recording hill forts, temples and antiquities. Henrietta’s perspective allowed her to illuminate the turbulent historical backdrop following the fall of Tipu Sultan from the point of view of a woman traveller. In a manner unlike that found in the writings of a professional soldier such as Colonel Arthur Wellesley and/or an East India Company envoy for British commerce such as Lord Richard Mornington, Henrietta offers a down-to-earth account of whatever situation she found herself in. In a narrative style that is conversational, captivating and, indeed, reflecting her own vitality, her writings provide a sense of permanence to the fleeting moments, people, places and events which ebbed and flowed about her. Likewise Anna Tonelli, Henrietta’s travelling companion, recorded the first watercolour sketches of scenes and people painted by a Western woman artist in the South Indian interior.

  Each day throughout her journey, Henrietta opened her writing box, took her pen in hand, dipped it into ink and inscribed her impressions, if only for the length of a page, in her multicoloured Indian paperback notebook. Letters to her husband began with a formal ‘My dear Lord Clive’, and gave an account of the sights and events experienced, along with a commentary about her health and that of their daughters. Although letters addressed to Lady Douglas and the Dowager Lady Clive occasionally contained personal references, for the most part they were more general and meant to be passed around for the entertainment of a select audience of friends and acquaintances. Letters to ‘My dearest brother’ were more intimate and provided Henrietta with a much needed outlet ‘to seem to talk to you’.

  I was to see only a few pages written by Henrietta’s brother, George Edward Herbert, whose early reluctance as a letter writer was noted in an undated letter written by his mother, Lady Barbara, to his father, the Earl of Powis, relaying a message to her young son from his little sister, Henrietta Herbert: ‘Henrietta and I agree George has neither pen, ink or paper for her and therefore we send him a sheet of paper and desire that he will borrow a pen from Will Thomas, ink from John Davies, and sense from the ass whose milk you drink. This is H. H.’s message.’ Throughout her life, any letter from ‘my dearest brother’ was greeted with Henrietta’s joy. On August 6th 1786, just before she and her husband set out for Naples on an extended stay in Europe, Henrietta responded to an unexpected letter from her brother saying, ‘At last to my great surprise I beheld the most beauteous scrawl of your lordship and tho’ I confess it was a letter yet it was not too long nor did it contain too much news and therefore you cannot expect a very long one from me.’

  Her brother was of immense importance to Henrietta. Presumably her personal vitality, her fearless passion for living life to the full and her joie de vivre were shared with him. Quite possibly Henrietta, or someone in the family, discreetly destroyed his letters to her, as well as many of hers to him. Jane Austen’s letters were edited by her sister, who cut out parts and burnt others for privacy’s sake. Lord Byron’s missives to his beloved sister Augusta were obtained by an indignant Lady Byron, who vindictively publicised their contents. Byron probably did not much care about privacy, but Henrietta, even as Jane Austen, was a careful and private person.

  Letters from other periods of Henrietta’s life were also in the boxes, but it was her depiction of life in India that propelled her compelling narrative forward with her accounts of sailing to India, residing in Madras, experiencing a beyond-the-ordinary seven-month adventure while travelling in South India and then sailing home. India is never easy, but the difficulties Henrietta encountered were heightened by her living in an age much less appreciative of such courage and tenacity in a woman. For the most part, wives were left at home. But then Henrietta was more than a wife: she was her own person of note. She did not fit with the prevailing attitudes of her time or with that of the memsahibs to follow in later years. Colonising and proselytising did not interest her in the least; a hands-on coming to know the world of India, however, emphatically did. Henrietta endeavoured to understand and to appreciate.

  * * *

  Henrietta’s avid desire to experience ‘the magnificence of the East’ was put in place when, as a girl, she had thrilled to first-hand accounts of the India adventures of her neighbour and mentor, Clive of India. On his return from India with vast wealth, Lord Clive had purchased Oakly Park from Henrietta’s father, Henry Arthur Herbert, the Earl of Powis. This transaction was to provoke discussions between the two men about the desirability of a marriage between Clive’s son Edward and the Earl’s daughter, an alliance that would offer prestige to the Clives and the possibility of reviving the fortunes of the titled and landed, but financially strapped, Herberts.

  When Henrietta was fourteen, her father died, having made no financial provision for his daughter or wife, yet all too typically, leaving his son, George Edward, heir to the Powis estate. Henrietta went to live in London with her brother, a foppishly fashionable and extravagant young man, who was three years older than she. He was to become part of the London social scene and a great favourite with the ‘Majesties’, King George III (1732–1820) and Queen Charlotte (1744–1818), driving elegant phaetons with spirited horses and hosting lavish and expensive festivities. For Henrietta he was always ‘my dearest brother’, her confidant. Brother and sister became deeply estranged from their mother, who as an habitué of the gaming tables with an addiction to the card game ‘loo’, vied with her son in spending the remaining Powis wealth. George Edward spurned his mother’s pleas to have him pay her gambling debts. In return Lady Barbara refused to sanction her son and daughter living together. In a letter to Probert, who looked after the family’s financial affairs, Lady Barbara noted her concerns: ‘It is not to be expressed what I feel. Henrietta would be undone if anything happens wrong.’

  The portrait that Sir Joshua Reynolds painted of Henrietta when she was nineteen depicts a good-looking, small, compact and shapely young woman. She stands against a backdrop of dark feathery tree branches without any of the psychological or social props such as a book, or a bust or needlework frequently employed by portrait painters of the time. Her gaze is contemplative. It is as if she has just turned to speak and one guesses her movements to be nimble, graceful and strong. She is dressed in a stylish but modest pale silk eighteenth-century costume that covers her arms and neck. The distinctive large hat that tilts at a precarious angle over the piled-up tresses of her wig and her stole, were added sometime later by a different hand. There is something oddly affectionate in the way Reynolds has offered the viewer a sense of Henrietta’s independent Welsh spirit, capturing her in an open-ended moment that seems to depict her inner potential as much as her lovely exterior. She gives every indication of being able to handle whatever might come her way.

  Clive of India died in 1774 leaving his son Edward a wealthy man. The marriage of Henrietta and Edward which the fathers had hoped for did not take place until ten years later, in May 1784. Not long before the wedding, Edward (aged thirty) wrote to his mother the Dowager Lady Clive to announce his decision to marry Henrietta (aged twenty-six): ‘I have ventured to declare my attachment to a Lady every way calculated to make me happy as a wife and I have been so fortunate as to meet with the most full and unreserved consent on her part. On yours, my Dear Madam, I have ventured to assure Lady H. Herbert there would be the most cordial concurrence and this I have presumed to do from knowledge of the sentiments you and my father entertained of the amiable person on whom depend all my prospects of comfort and felicity. To know that in following my own inclinations I run along with your wishes and what were those of his whose opinions to me are sacred i
s an important satisfaction.’ They were married in London at the Portland Place address of Henrietta’s brother, the Earl of Powis. Lady Barbara, with whom neither daughter nor son had resolved their conflicts, was not invited to the wedding. In a note to the aforementioned Probert, she commented that ‘my situation as a mother is I believe rather uncommon as neither the day or any other circumstance has been signified to me either by the bride or Lord Powis’. Lord Clive called on her afterwards to inform her of the event.

  Over the next five years Henrietta had four children: a son, Edward, was born on March 22nd 1785 and a daughter, Harriet Antonia (Harry) on September 5th 1786. On September 12th 1787, while she and her husband were still on their Grand Tour, Henrietta gave birth in Florence, Italy to their third child, Charlotte Florentia (Charly). To her brother left at home in England with the older children (‘the brats’ as she affectionately called them) Henrietta, a committed traveller, sent a steady flow of lively, lightly humorous letters. There was no doubt that she found Italy invigorating: ‘I draw a great deal now and shall soon equal Raphael.’ She easily handled the less desirable aspects of being in strange locales: ‘Fleas and bugs are in a very flourishing state in Italy and feed most comfortably upon poor me.’ Moreover Henrietta seemed pleased with Lord Clive’s commitment to looking after her health, noting: ‘Lord Clive makes me walk miles everyday … I live upon vegetable – neither Irish beer or wine or anything but milk and water.’

  In March 1788 Henrietta and her husband saw that Charly was inoculated with smallpox vaccine in Rome. Henrietta wrote to her brother that ‘this event makes a great noise in Rome as inoculation is looked upon with great horror and the old friars settled in the English coffee house that she would certainly die the third day, but now people are growing more reconciled to it and if she succeeds the Surgeon who attends (but only looks on) is to inoculate ten or twelve directly … therefore your niece’s name will be early famous, at Rome and she will occasion the safety of many children.’ For this first trip abroad, the ever industrious Henrietta had learned to read and speak Italian. Not long after the family reunited in England, the Clives’ fourth and last child, Robert, was born on January 15th 1789.