Birds of Passage
Page 33
Relieved that the East India Company had ‘made it proper for him to return’, Henrietta confided to Lady Douglas that ‘Lord Clive has taken it just as I wished and returns home directly, which pleases me on all accounts’. When her husband was finally on the seas she wrote, ‘In every account his family requires a head … though I have every reason to rejoice in the good disposition of my boys, as well as my girls, yet I am sure a young man ought to have a father near him.’ On his return to England, Lord Clive wrote to his mother to say ‘that your ladyship is about to be relieved from the necessity of having the title of Dowager prefixed to your name, at least till the period of Edward’s marriage, by my promotion to the Earldom of Powis with the title of Viscount Clive of Ludlow for this second title’. On November 21st 1804 he was created Earl of Powis and Henrietta was henceforth known as the Countess of Powis.
In 1822, Henrietta, once again moved by her strong awareness of ‘so much uncertainty in human life’, wrote to her son Edward to ask that he would act as her executor. ‘Despite the fact that I know that as a married woman I have not any legal right to dispose of whatever I leave behind,’ she wanted him ‘to see my wishes performed as you would do in any more momentous affair of the same kind.’ It was her desire to be buried ‘in the Parish church at Welshpool in the family vault and as near the remains of my poor brother as circumstances will allow. I say decently buried because I think the showy funerals of my poor father and brother were much more to gratify the vanity of the living than to show regard to the dead.’
Henrietta’s request was not honoured. On June 3rd 1830, she died at the age of seventy-two at Walcot and was buried at Bromfield, County Salop. Her husband, who continued in his later years to work frequently in his Walcot garden, died at eighty-five at his London house, 45 Berkeley Square, on May 16th 1839. He was buried next to Henrietta at Bromfield.
* * *
I had first seen Henrietta’s notebooks and letters in 1989. For a number of years, other endeavours held precedence in my life. Not until a trip to South India in November 1992 did I visit in a piecemeal fashion some of the destinations of Henrietta’s 1800 travels: some were already familiar to me from earlier visits to India, making them seem a dual adventure. However, neither elephants nor palanquins figured in my journey; instead I travelled in a clunky old, made-in-India, white, Hindustan Ambassador car. Henrietta’s extreme luxury – of travelling with her bedding, her tents, and her things – was denied to me. Nor did I have an accompanying cook. Instead I feasted on South Indian vegetarian thalis served on banana leaves in simple restaurants or on metal plates in fancier ones. Delicious vegetable curries and sambar (a lentil soup) of the day were piled on top of rice; mango pickles and yoghurt were added. There were, as well, iddlis (steamed rice cakes) and dosas (rice pancakes) plain or filled, served with sambar and coconut chutney. Fiery dishes complemented bland ones; dry tastes offset wet ones.
Fully aware that historical moments are indeed always on the verge of vanishing from sight and smell and sound, I retraced some of Henrietta’s and my earlier steps. In Madras (Chennai), despite decay and encroaching modernity, I could still see an entrance-way tall enough for an elephant to have delivered an eighteenth-century passenger. Strolling through Pondicherry, I found elegant, albeit faded, French-style houses and squares, that maintained a vague essence of a former eighteenth-century self. In cosmopolitan Bangalore, now a centre of technological and medical research activities, I sought my favourite bookstore, Premier Books, where the owner had continued to set aside a stack of books he knew I’d like, believing in my eventual return even after some time had elapsed. The remains of Tipu’s abandoned palace had fared rather badly: the elegant colours so admired by Henrietta were greatly diminished. The botanically lush gardens of the Lalbagh still gave an indication as to how profuse it once had been with its magnificent flowering trees, including flaming red gulmohur and deep blue jacaranda, enhanced by flowing cascades of cerise bougainvillea. The scent of roses enveloped me. In Seringapatam, Tipu’s monuments were thronged by tourists who quenched their thirsts with tender coconuts even as I was doing and Henrietta must have done. The hill fort Nandidrug persisted in its isolation and enveloping fog; in a courtyard red chili peppers were spread to dry whenever the sun made its appearance. Despite traffic congestion, Mysore, with Chamundi Hill hovering behind various domes, spires and palaces, continued to exude charm. There in R. K. Narayan’s fictional world, Malgudi, I easily acknowledged Gayatri, the goddess whose five heads are depicted in as many vivid colours and whose bounty assures ordinary people that their enterprises will be successful. Both Henrietta and I had our own surprising encounters with multi-headed goddesses.
Ooty (Ootacamund) still offered the respite and the quiet beauty of what was once a heavily forested, mountainous India with many tigers and no roads. Even today spirit dancers wearing tiger masks and costumes still honour tiger spirits (Pilichamundi) in Kerala and South Kanara, at festivals permeated with the smell of night-blooming jasmine. In this instance, a rainy night was enlivened by the appearance of a nest of rats when I turned back the covers on my bed. Rats remain ubiquitous in India. At Ryacottah, Henrietta’s ‘rock’ retreat, the silence was broken not by a scolding displeased goddess, such as had threatened Henrietta, but by a band of menacing monkeys – Charly’s friends – who also accompanied me as I hiked to a long-deserted bungalow. It was there that once the ‘discordant sounds’ of harp and pianoforte had prevailed as Charly and Harry practised their musical instruments under Signora Tonelli’s supervision.
Still following in Henrietta’s footsteps, in Trichy (Tiruchirapalli) I, too, found the streets awash with sheets of rain sweeping inland from a violent coastal storm. Never could anyone have imagined such rain. Below the fort, water ran thigh high in the passageways. Water was everywhere. ‘Nothing happened,’ the driver greeted me cheerfully the next morning as he summed up our previous day’s journey by saying, ‘When we drive on banks of river, there is no railing. No nothing. It is a bad road.’ He took, however, the precaution of gracing the car’s dashboard with an offering of fresh jasmine and incense sticks whose scent accompanied us. Where the road is (or is not) proved to be difficult to decide as we continued to Tanjore (Thanjavur) making our way amidst swimming snakes, fallen trees and paddy fields become ponds. I looked, but saw no ‘gentlemen cows or their ladies’. Unlike Henrietta I did not get to travel by boat.
Nobody, including the driver, seemed to know how to reach Tranquebar (in Tamil, Taramgambadi: ‘village by the sound of the wave’). Indeed Tranquebar, built by the Danish East India Company in 1620, nestles right on the edge of the sea. On our arrival roaring waves relentlessly lashed a variety of churches, tidy rows of red-tile-roofed houses, and the impressive fort: a pinkish-yellow ochre edifice that gleamed despite the steady heavy rain. As the driver and I struggled to gain access to the ramparts of the fort and shelter within, waves began to sweep over the parapet.
‘Never will I forget Tranquebar,’ said the driver, well pleased with our having survived. Neither will I forget. Nor, I feel certain, did Henrietta, who would have delighted in my having come on board to experience this battering of wind, rain and waves. Her journal entries in Tranquebar recorded the presence of enormous mosquitoes; of the encroachment of the sea; of Danish naturalists who discussed their marvellous collections (butterflies, shells, plants) and Danish missionaries, ‘who do little in the way of conversation’; and a wonderful Commander of the fort who dignified her visit with a salute fired from the battlements and who wore immense red rosettes upon his shoes at the ball given in her honour.
* * *
Henrietta’s writings from India save from extinction fragments of a time long removed from our present. Her words, certainly not written with today’s reader in mind, nonetheless maintain the ability to evoke with fresh immediacy what it was like for her to be in South India in the years 1798–1801 as she followed the changing contours of military maps made for military campaigns. As a tra
veller she had an overwhelming desire to experience the here and now intensely – ‘as long as I can, as I am here’. She had the gift of embracing each moment. Frequently, the Indian realities she encountered were disappointing: the dirty and dark zenanas were decidedly not the seraglios of The Arabian Nights; the women who inhabited them were, for the most part, not beautiful and not bejewelled. The splendour of the East was less opulent than she had wished: the shabby Nawab of the Carnatic ‘had neither pearls as large as pigeons’ eggs nor diamonds’. Nonetheless, she persevered despite having found ‘nothing like Haroun Alraschid or the Viccer Giafor’ (The Arabian Nights).
Henrietta, a dynamic traveller, acknowledged the poetry of place as she came to know India first-hand, holding firmly to her belief that ‘a little change is necessary to keep on being alive’. She found vestiges of Oriental splendour: Tipu’s shower room at his abandoned Bangalore palace and the ruins of his zenanas in the gardens overgrown with white rose trees. She visited ancient bazaars aglow with colour and vibrant with scent; she participated with multitudes of Muslims at a Hussein Hassan festival; she received wet garlands of flowers from priests at Hindu temples. Monsoon storms and relentless heat became part of her life. Alligators threatened her river crossings; ‘tygers’ stalked her party in mountain passes. She called on the heir to the Mysore throne, the six-year-old Rajah, ensconced on red velvet cushions given to Tipu Sultan by the King of France. She visited the Ranee, the Rajah’s extremely fat grandmother. Although the very sounds of South Indian place names – Madras, Arcot, Trichinopoly, Tranquebar, and Seringapatam – continued to allure and nurture her fantasies, Henrietta partook fully of the realities she found before they were to vanish. Following in her footsteps, I savoured the duality of her moments flowing within mine in that instant before they disappeared.
Just as Great Britain was about to become the dominant world power, Henrietta in India came to know first-hand three of the players who assumed significant roles in altering the course of history for the next century. Two of these were the Irish Wellesley brothers. Lord Mornington, the Governor General of India (later created Marquis Wellesley) had empowered the British Empire by orchestrating the defeat of Tipu Sultan. Although Mornington ran afoul of the East India Company for extravagant expenditures at Calcutta and his reception in England was less gratifying than his expectations, he was ultimately acknowledged for his India services and awarded £20,000. Colonel Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, whose military skills were honed by his battle tactics in his various India campaigns, went on to lead England in its defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. And third, Henrietta’s emphasis on ‘learning with all our might’, as she described her pursuits in India and those of her daughters, would serve Charly well when, as the Duchess of Northumberland, she was appointed governess for those impressionable years age eleven to eighteen (1830–1837) of Princess Alexandrina Victoria, the future Queen of England and Empress of India.
Although Henrietta had pursued drawing with a passion during her earlier travels in Italy, she later wrote dismissively of her abilities saying simply, ‘I used to draw.’ During her India journey, she refrained from sketching and chose to rely on Anna Tonelli for pictorial details of the scenes and people along the way. Some years later, Charly’s India journal with the unwieldy title, Journal of a Voyage to the East Indies, and during a residence there, A Tour Through the Mysore and Tanjore Countries &c, & and the Return Voyage to England by C. F. Clive was copied by calligrapher W. H. Ramsey on paper watermarked 1857 in a handsome crimson leather-bound edition with metal clasps. In it Charly included copies of Signora Tonelli’s India watercolours, excerpts from Henrietta’s journal, military maps of South India used on their trek, and the architectural plans for Lord Clive’s government house in Madras. Together the trio – Henrietta, Charly and Anna Tonelli – achieved a pen and brush account of their journey.
Through her India letters and notebook entries Henrietta provided a select circle of friends and family with vivid descriptions of her unique travel experiences. Likewise readers today can sample her eighteenth-century interests, tastes and feelings. Whether or not Henrietta fully comprehended the Sufi mysticism of Hafiz’s ephemeral ambiguities, she resonated to his imagery. The emptiness she experienced on her return to an England devoid of the one person with whom she shared the greatest affinity might well have caused her to recall a Hafiz line which she had translated, ‘For here there is nothing caught in the snare but wind.’ Despite her sorrow, she rallied, applying her energies to sorting out her brother’s legacy to her son Edward, who on assuming the name Herbert assured the continuation of Powis Castle within the Herbert dynasty.
Among Henrietta’s Indian treasures, that she unpacked in 1802 when she was home again in Wales, was a bejewelled gold tiger-head finial salvaged from the destruction of Tipu Sultan’s golden throne and given to her by Lord Mornington. Shortly after the celebration in Madras following the fall of Seringapatam, Lord Mornington had commented to Henrietta ‘that it seemed appropriate there should not be a great victory in this country without a Clive being concerned with it’. Be that as it may, Henrietta, steadfast in her attempt to come to know as much as she could about the oriental culture of her dream of the East, had not sought the crass bounty of thoughtless and rapacious colonists. In Wales, as she ruefully examined her specimens of Indian flora and fauna, she noted of Dr Heyne that ‘he mineralises better than he packs up’. While arranging it all she described herself in a typically Henrietta way as feeling ‘as great as any Eastern Princess in the midst of her treasure’. Included among those treasures were a stuffed tiger, tiger claws and a bunch of tiger whiskers on red velvet. In her will she would bequeath all her ‘Stuffed Birds and beasts with the Cabinets of Minerals’ to her eldest son, Edward, ‘hoping he will in time increase the Collection, as well as ensuring fires to be kept to preserve them from damp’. Apparently he did not; her collection of birds at Powis looked to be a bit bedraggled with the passage of time.
The records of Henrietta’s experience – her notebooks and letters – speak to those ephemeral moments of her travel to, within and from India and as such provide gifts of appreciation for the India of that day. Henrietta’s words allow other travellers in heart and in mind to walk in her footsteps and thereby experience the vibrancy of her independent ‘Welsh spirit’ as she actively quested for and partook of the East: ‘I believe I am thought a strange restless animal,’ Henrietta wrote in 1800 as she crossed through the Guzelhutty Pass into Coimbatoor Country. ‘A black woman never moves and the white ones in this country are not much more active. Besides I descend from my dignity and walk upon my own feet at every place where I take up my abode.’ What she found when she walked upon her own feet rarely matched the Orient of her imagination, but she had that rare capacity to embrace each moment wholeheartedly. The real ‘treasures’ that Henrietta took home with her were not in trunks and boxes, but in her mind.
A Brief Bibliography
Manuscripts
Clive, Lady Henrietta, India journals and India letters 1797–1801 (Powis MSS, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth)
Clive, Charlotte, India journal 1798–1801 (Oriental and India Office collections, British Library, London)
Sydenham, Thomas, Captain, Letter to Charlotte Clive and Military Descriptions of South India, included in Charlotte Clive’s Journal (Oriental and India Office collections, British Library, London)
Selected Works
Archer, Mildred, Company Drawings in the India Office Library (London, 1972)
Archer, Mildred, Tippoo’s Tiger (1959)
Archer, Mildred, Early Views of India: the Picturesque Journeys of Thomas and William Daniels 1786–1794 (London, 1980)
Avijit, Anshul, ‘The Artist’s Eye: India 1770–1835’, India Today, (Kolkata, 9 March 2001)
Barnard, Anne (ed. A. M. Lewin Robinson), The Cape Journals of Lady Anne Barnard 1797–98 (Cape Town, 1994)
Barnard, Anne (ed. A. M. Lewin Robinson),
The Letters of Lady Anne Barnard to Henry Dundas from the Cape and Elsewhere 1793–1803 (Cape Town, 1973)
Beatson, Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander, Geographical Observations in Mysore & the Barramaul with an Examination of the Passes of … Ryacota & Anchitty (Madras, 1792)
Becker, Carl L., The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, 1932, pbk, 1959)
Buddle, Anne, Tigers round the Throne: The Court of Tipu Sultan 1750– 1799 (London, 1990)
Cokayne, The Complete Peerage, Vol III, p. 324
Dalrymple, William, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (London, 2002)
Davies, Philip, Splendours of the Raj: British Architecture in India 1660– 1947 (London, 1985)
Fay, Eliza, Original Letters from India (1817)
Forrest, Denys, Tiger of Mysore: the Life and Death of Tipu Sultan (London, 1970)
Gardner, B., The East India Company (London, 1971)
Graham, Maria, Journal of a Residence in India 1809–1811 (London, 1813)
Gentleman, David, David Gentleman’s India (London, 1994)
A Handbook for Travellers in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh & Sri Lanka edited by Professor L. F. Rushbrook Williams (London, 1978)