by Julia Lovell
The Foreign Office was only one of the British government’s problems. As domestic discontent mounted through the poor harvests, industrial depression and growing unemployment of the 1830s, the public lost confidence in the Whigs. When the administration refused to look at the Chartists’ radical petitions – which demanded universal male suffrage, secret ballots, equal electoral districts, annual elections and the abolition of the property requirement for MPs – violence erupted. In Birmingham, the Bullring riots of summer 1839 left the city looking, in the Duke of Wellington’s description, as if it had been ‘taken by storm’.10 On 7 May, the prime minister was forced to resign after winning a debate by only five votes, leaving the Tories, under Robert Peel, to assemble a government. When the young Queen Victoria refused to have her favourite Whig ladies of the bedchamber replaced by a cohort of female Tories, Peel resigned, leaving Victoria to invite her beloved Melbourne, the Whig prime minister, to form his government once more. The Bedchamber Crisis left the Whigs looking not only unpopular, but also unconstitutional – dependent on the whims of a girl queen. Morally righteous in opposition, the Tories refused to support anything the Whigs did; the radical elements in Parliament – sensing the Whigs depended on their cooperation for survival – pushed hard for political reforms. It was an uncomfortable summer for the government in which Palmerston served.
Bad times at home were accompanied by troubles abroad. In the course of 1839, rebellions broke out in Ireland, Jamaica and Canada, forcing the government to suspend the constitution in both the last two territories. In Egypt and Afghanistan, both France (which was also busy in Mexico and Argentina, harassing British merchant vessels and blockading British investments) and Russia were meddling with access routes to India. In the early months of 1839, India’s governor-general, Lord Auckland, dispatched a 10,000-strong British army across the Indus and up the mountainous valleys towards Kabul, to replace the Afghan ruler (rumoured to be friendly to the Russians) with a weak exile called Shah Shuja. The awful finale of the expedition – a retreat back to India in which only one Briton survived out of the 16,500 who began it – was still three years off, but the mere idea of the war was already horrifying politicians in London, who blamed Palmerston for picking an expensive fight, for underestimating the difficulties, for sexing up the case against Russian ambitions by heavily editing a collection of field dispatches on Afghanistan. Just like the Qing thousands of miles away, the British were anxious to count the cost of all these rebellions and wars: in 1837, the country achieved a budget deficit of more than £2 million; by 1840, plans to subsidize the new Penny Post had enlarged it further.11
‘Parliamentary business’, concluded the radical Lord Brougham on 23 August 1839, ‘was instructed to the hands of men utterly imbecile and incapable’.12 The diarist and amateur cricketer Charles Greville was especially unkind about Palmerston:
Palmerston, the most enigmatical of Ministers, who is detested by the Corps diplomatique, abhorred in his own office, unpopular in the H. of Commons, liked by nobody, abused by everybody, still reigns in his little kingdom of the Foreign Office, and is impervious to any sense of shame from the obloquy that has been cast upon him, and apparently not troubling himself about the affairs of the government generally, which he leaves it to others to defend and uphold as they best may.13
The triumphalist commentators of high British imperialism would later emphasize the contrasts between mid-nineteenth-century Britain and China: the one modern and progressive, the other antiquated and regressive; the one Christian, the other heathen; the one open, the other isolationist. In reality, both country’s leaders – if they had been able to observe each other’s situations – would have found much common ground.
The missive containing the news from China had settled first on the desk of Lord Auckland on 25 May 1839, as he sheltered from the Calcutta heat at the foothills of the Himalayas. ‘Yesterday’, he wrote to John Cam Hobhouse, President of the Board of Control in London, ‘was Her Majesty’s birthday, and all that are white in Simla dined with me in our most beautiful valley . . . there were cheers for the Queen, and never was loyalty better displayed that it has been in the Himalayas.’ But, he continued, as if irked by the tactlessness of the unfortunate Indian dak (postal) runner who had toiled at speed through the worst of the summer heat, ‘as I was about to finish my letter, the news from China came in, and here is a new source of trouble of anxiety’.14 He decided to stay put; Calcutta was so unreasonably warm at this time of year – in any case, he needed to be close at hand for news from Afghanistan. ‘The decision must be with you in England’, he informed Hobhouse a week or two later, sitting himself comfortably on the fence.15 ‘As regards India,’ he went on nonchalantly, ‘we must for the present look upon the opium revenue as annihilated . . . but as you know, I have always great confidence in the growing resources of India and I would still look cheeringly at our financial prospects.’ Not so ‘upon the prospects of a war with China, for I see its embarrassments, and I do not see its end’. Hobhouse, after he received Auckland’s letter in mid-September, was inclined to agree: ‘Doubtless, you must give up the cultivation of the poppy, and substitute an unprofitable export duty for your present monopoly.’16 Let the two million go, then – time for Britain to cleanse itself of the murk of opium money.
Neither would Palmerston commit himself on the China question. When William Jardine steamed into London in September, a conversation with the Foreign Secretary was high on his list of priorities. He soon found the political establishment – in contrast, perhaps, with the pliability of Canton society – surprisingly unyielding. ‘We have heard nothing from H. M. ministers reporting their intention,’ he replied to Matheson, on hearing the news of his partner’s expulsion from Canton, ‘nor have I seen Lord Palmerston . . . In his conversation with Mr Smith [Jardine-Matheson’s London agent, and an MP] he led him to believe that as far as his own sentiments went, he was convinced some measures ought to be taken of the gross insult and robbery; but would not commit himself further.’ The snubbed Jardine buried himself in merchant committee meetings, in petitions, in meeting Liverpool and Manchester deputations – but was still unable to suppress his irritation. The events of the Canton spring, he complained, are ‘very little understood here, and many people are for doing nothing; they, very foolishly, mix up the insult and violence with the illicit trade, and are for remaining quiet, pocketing the insult, and refusing to pay for the opium.’ Finally, on 27 September, an appointment with Palmerston was won. To try Jardine’s patience a little more, the Pumicestone (a nickname bequeathed to the foreign secretary by diplomats he had rubbed up the wrong way) kept him waiting for two hours, before extracting as much practical information as possible (about the lie of the Chinese coast, the likely size of a force needed to hold key ports) in exchange for no promises. ‘No direct avowal [was] made of a determination to coerce’, a disappointed Jardine reported back to Matheson afterwards. ‘The conference ended in his Lordship retaining the charts and saying they were to hold a Cabinet counsel Monday next . . . All this is unsatisfactory enough but we must await silently.’17
On 30 September, eight members of the government (including Palmerston) sat down to an extended Cabinet crisis meeting in Windsor Castle. China, however, was so far from the top of the agenda that the assembled worthies did not get near it that day. Instead, discussion was devoted to the attempt by the ruler of Egypt, Mehemet Ali, to take over Syria. ‘The Turkish question’, Palmerston informed his prime minister, ‘is one of more extensive Interest and Importance to England than any other’.18 The following day, the ministers at last gathered once more to think about what to do with China. Unfortunately, the best of the group’s energies seem to have been used up the previous day; at one point in the conversation, Hobhouse grew so impatient that he picked up his hat, in readiness to go. The weariness of the assembled company seems to have pared the debate down to its logistics. With barely a sideways glance at the question of the morality of war, exhausted min
isters concentrated on two key questions: Can it be done? And who will pay?
Buoyed by his meeting with Jardine, Palmerston was all for talking up the ease of the expedition: ‘a small squadron of one line of battle ship, two frigates and some small armed vessels with two or three steamers might blockade the whole coast of China from the river of Pekin down to the Canton coast.’ As Melbourne and Hobhouse doubted whether it would indeed be so straightforward, the debate moved on to the issue of who was going to pay for the confiscated opium. Those present really didn’t mind – as long as it wasn’t the government: the Chancellor, Francis Baring, was keen to clarify that he didn’t have the money. Suppose the Chinese were to foot the bill? Palmerston suggested. This met with applause from the young, excitable Thomas Macaulay, attending his first Cabinet meeting. (His recent four-year stint in India spoke loudly of his special feeling for Asian sensibilities: between 1834 and 1838, he had instituted an anglophone colonial education system to create ‘a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect.’ For, after all, ‘a single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.’19) From here, the conversation veered away from the tricky question of extorting drug money at gunpoint, and towards the simpler, more stirring issue of patriotism: the main thing, believed Hobhouse, was ‘obtaining redress for the outrage on Elliot, which we all agree was indispensable for the national honour’.20 Treacherous natives, Macaulay felt, needed a firm stance – and perhaps he now wore his Cabinet colleagues down with an early rehearsal of the pro-war speech he would deliver in Parliament the following April.
The moment at which [Elliot] landed he was surrounded by his countrymen in an agony of despair at their situation, but the first step which he took was to order the flag of Great Britain to be taken from the boat and to be planted in the balcony . . . It was natural that they should look with confidence on the victorious flag which was hoisted over them, which reminded them that they belonged to a country unaccustomed to defeat, to submission, or to shame . . . that made the Bey of Algiers humble himself to her insulted consul; that revenged the horrors of the black hole on the fields of Plessey; that had not degenerated since her great Protector vowed that he would make the name of Englishman as respected as ever had been the name of Roman citizen.21
‘If he was always so powerful in talking, no business would be done’, whispered one member of his captive Windsor audience.22 ‘I thought he spoke too much’, agreed Hobhouse, in his diary. As much as anything, there seems to have been a sense that it was time for this beleaguered government to take a stance on something – anything. Spineless! the opposition had howled repeatedly as Palmerston did little to protect British interests and honour in either Mexico or Argentina in late 1838 – even after Britons had been fired upon by French men-of-war. Perhaps the Cabinet fancied its chances best against China (where, unlike in Syria, Afghanistan, Mexico or Argentina, there was no chance of confronting the French or Russians). ‘The charges made against us of idleness’, Hobhouse remarked to Macaulay, once the decision to send a squadron had been taken, ‘could hardly be sustained . . . we had resolved upon . . . a war with the master of one-third of the human race.’23 A habitual critic of Palmerston’s ideas, Lord Holland, was unable to engage sufficiently with the subject of China to be present, his only opinion on the matter being that the cousin of his dining companion Gilbert Elliot-Murray-Kynymound, Lord Minto and First Lord of the Admiralty (Charles Elliot) needed a hand.24
But the Cabinet was still far from enthusiastic. Unconvinced that a small force would really be sufficient, the prime minister was all for deferring to the indecisive Lord Auckland in India, thereby procrastinating for another six months. The business of fighting a war for opium, worried the Chancellor, was going to be a ‘bother in the H of C’. The East India Company, far from enjoying the prospect of ‘China opened’, refused to offer a ‘positive opinion’ of the decision (though they cheered up when told that the government, and not the Honourable Company, would be footing the bill).25 Palmerston, meanwhile, had no intention of pandering to Britain’s opium interests. Not a penny of the £2 million needed to cover the costs of the destroyed opium would be advanced by H.M. Government – it would all come, in good time, from the Chinese. When Jardine and his representatives persisted in trying to extract at least a faint commitment for compensation out of the government, their communications were tersely inscribed by FO clerks: ‘returned by Lord P. without observation’.26
In early November, Palmerston instructed Auckland to prepare forces for China – though not with excessive haste. For war – even for something as precious as the national honour – must not disrupt the trading season. Hostilities, it was hoped, would be tucked neatly into the window offered by the close of trading in March, and its reopening in September 1840. Finally, then, the Governor-General prepared to return to Calcutta and concentrate on things Chinese.
Palmerston’s plan suffered from one inconvenient oversight: a failure to consult Parliament on the issue. To the intense annoyance of his opponents, he kept Elliot’s dispatches locked up in the FO for as long as he possibly could. But however hard he worked to keep the full picture out of the public domain, there was no preventing information – from merchant and missionary witnesses, from the Canton and Indian English-language press – seeping out into the nation’s newspapers. ‘We have employed W. P. Freshfield, the solicitor, to look into the nature of our claims [against] H. M. government and to engage the Times newpaper [sic] to write in favour of them’, wrote William Jardine to Matheson in late October 1839, ‘but I have not heard what he has done.’27 Not very much, one might conclude from glancing through the paper’s coverage of the China question as the winter of 1839 turned into the spring of 1840. True, it gave space to a sprinkling of polite but firm requests from representatives of the opium lobby that the British government honour Charles Elliot’s promise of compensation, backed by subtle reminders of the British government’s own complicity. ‘Your petitioners’, wheedled one such example of the genre, ‘have been deprived of property to a very large extent . . . they have the fullest confidence in the well known justice of the British government . . . that they will duly indemnify them.’ So much confidence, in fact, that almost in the next breath they found it necessary to remind all concerned that ‘the trade in opium has been encouraged and promoted by the Indian Government under the express sanction and authority lately of the British Government and Parliament, and with the full knowledge . . . that the trade in it was confined to China, and was contraband and illegal . . . it has proved a source of immense profit to the Indian Government, netting to them a revenue, during the last twenty years, of from half a million sterling annually, to latterly two millions sterling per annum.’28 ‘It is certain’, one private correspondent huffed and puffed at the end of November, ‘that our trade will never be on a proper footing until we teach these people to respect us, and the present seems a fitting opportunity.’29
More frequently, though, the paper (a pro-Tory, and therefore anti-Whig, organ) deplored the situation. ‘Seldom’, thundered The Times of 13 August 1839, as the earliest reports of trouble in Canton arrived in England, ‘have we had to record events in which our trading interests, and our honour as a great and civilised country, have been brought so deeply into question as in this instance.’ Over the following months, rather than publicize James Matheson’s view that ‘during 21 years that I have passed almost entirely in China, I can conscientiously declare that I have never seen a native in the least bestialised by opium smoking’, The Times chose to serialize the Reverend Algernon Thelwall’s The Iniquities of the Opium Trade with China, a 178-page diatribe against a business that ‘brought the greatest dishonour on the British flag’.30 No sympathy was expressed for either the actions of Charles Elliot (who, one editorial diagnosed, ‘seems to have fed on a diet of brimstone’), or the imprisoned merchant community (who suffered no privation beyond o
btaining ‘a closer acquaintance with certain culinary processes than they could formerly claim’).31 ‘Our sin’, the 23 October issue observed, ‘in growing and encouraging the trade in opium is, indeed, one of the darkest that ever invoked the wrath of the Most High God upon a people.’32 Asking for compensation was sheer ‘effrontery’; going to war, unthinkable. ‘Justice forbids that the steps taken by the Chinese to arrest a system of wrongs practised on them, under the mask of friendship, be made the pretence for still deeper injuries.’33
On Christmas Day 1839, The Times could barely contain itself while discussing a pro-war pamphlet (whose recommendations on the China question almost precisely anticipated the stipulations of the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing). ‘Most of our readers who have turned their attention to the disputes now pending with China must have been surprised and amused at many of the projects for settling these disputes which have from time to time been started . . . We think, however, that the plan which we are about to lay before the public will at once be found the most astonishing and entertaining of the whole.’ The editorialist then set out the pamphlet’s vision: compensation for the opium and for the insult of the blockade; a commercial treaty; the cession of Lantao (the island just west of Hong Kong, on which the territory’s airport now rests). ‘It is meant as a joke, of course – a burlesque’.34
