Heaven’s Command

by Jan Morris

  6

  All this may seem dangerously close to war-worship, but Englishmen found it easy enough to reconcile their imperial imagery with a pre-Raphaelite vision of Christianity—the Gun beside the Light—as Cecil Spring-Rice demonstrated in the second verse of his famous patriotic hymn, I Vow To Thee My Country:

  And there’s another country, I’ve beard of long ago.

  Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;

  We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;

  Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;

  And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,

  And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.

  When all is said, the nearest thing the Empire had to a religion of its own, as cohesive as Catholicism or Islam, was the rite of the Anglican Church, diffused in such mysterious ways across the world. By now there were cathedrals in St Helena, Hobart, Grahamstown and Hong Kong. The Bishop of Gibraltar’s see extended from Portugal to the Caspian,1 the Bishop of Newfoundland was also Bishop of Bermuda, and the black Bishop of Sierra Leone had recently ended the worship of the monitor lizard in the Niger delta. St Paul’s Cathedral, Calcutta, took five hours to dedicate—‘for ever hereafter dedicated and consecrated’, the officiating Bishop said it was, ‘by this our definitive sentence of final decree which we make pronounce and promulge in these writings, saving and reserving unto us and our successors Bishops of Calcutta all ordinary and Episcopal Jurisdictions rights and privileges’. Bishop Colenso may have seemed a lost heretic to his Metropolitan in Cape Town, but to his Zulu disciples he was undoubtedly a high priest of the imperial conviction, and wherever the British flag flew in the world, Anglicanism was generally accepted as the outward form of its inner grace.

  In Dublin the great men of the Ascendancy bowed to the Queen’s Viceroy as he entered his pew in the grim old cathedral of St Patrick, where the war memorials commemorated many a death in the imperial cause, and the congregation optimistically sang Hymn 303 in the Church of Ireland hymnal—Lift thy banners, Church of Erin, to thine ancient faith we cling. In Malta the sailors marched for church parade to the cool shuttered cathedral built at the express desire of Queen Adelaide on the shores of the Grand Harbour—a temple of the English way, from whose forecourt after Matins the captains could look out to their warships lying at anchor below, at whose altar commanders’ wives and bank managers’ ladies devotedly arranged the flowers, in whose front pews the Governor shared equal precedence with the Admiral Commanding, and through whose louvred windows the fine old English hymns rang lustily across the lanes of Valetta (where the Papist Maltese superstitiously crossed themselves before their images, and those ratings excused church parade that day loitered in the Gut waiting for the brothels to open).

  In Madras the soldiers, the civil servants, the box-wallahs and their wives crowded stiff-collared and muslined into the garrison church of St Mary’s, within Fort St George, whose very walls breathed the antique glamour of the Raj: there were baptized the three daughters of Job Charnock, founder of Calcutta, by the Hindu mistress he had rescued from the suttee pyre—there Clive was married, and the Duke of Wellington worshipped, and eight Governors lay buried—the Princess of Tanjore had presented the altar rails, the altar piece was captured from the French at Pondicherry, and the church itself, so tradition said, had been designed not by an architect at all, but by Edward Fowle, Master Gunner of the Fort. And far away in the east the Sunday congregation crowded into the white cathedral of St Andrew’s above the Padang at Singapore—white in Anglican purity, white beside the fretted peeling presence of the city around, white against the rusty coasters lying in the roads, white for Raffles who had founded the city, and who hoped the Empire would be remembered always in ‘characters of light’—white with the linen suits of the merchants in their pews, and the vestments of the clergy beyond the lectern—white for the Great White Queen, the improving zeal of Empire, the blank pages of ledgers yet to be completed, or perhaps for the uniforms of the toiling convicts who, only twenty years before under the direction of the Royal Engineers, had created that holy building in the heat.

  In any of these great churches, any Sunday morning, the empire builders assemble in their hierarchy, Europeans in the front pews, Africans, or Indians, or Chinese, or plain aborigines behind: and Lady Dicehurt envies Mrs Duncebury her pearls, and young Tom Morris sniggers at Mrs Timbury’s hat, and down they all kneel in familiar discipline, two or three hundred gathered together in the name of Empire, while the chaplain’s Oxford English echoes among the memorials: and when the time comes the choir, rising to its feet with a swishing of starched surplices and a faint emanation of gumdrops, launches into one of the full-throated anthems of Anglicanism—Wesley’s Wilderness, Mendelssohn’s Oh for the Wings, or best of all, if it is nearly Christmas time in Melbourne or Toronto, Crotch’s

  Lo, Star-led Chiefs,

  Assyrian Odours bring

  —a work which, with its magic ensemble of the exotic, the homely, the reverent, the funny, the lyrical and the mysterious, truly sings the ethos of Empire.1

  1 Not that such catechism training was always successful. The Hau Hau cult of New Zealand, though partly biblical in its beliefs, included among its rituals the sacrifice of Anglican clergymen.

  1 Astutely: at its foundation its priests were instructed by the Vatican to show loyalty to the British Crown ‘at all times and places’, and throughout the 19th century they remained staunch supporters of the imperial Establishment.

  1 The trees are big now, and the house was burnt down years ago, but the view from the farm that stands upon its site remains unchanged, and Colenso’s cherished garden is still full of tangled charm.

  1 As an Afrikaner academic explained to me a century later, ‘you must realize that we are divided into our separate races, black, brown and white, according to our degree of original sin’—the ultimate rationalization, I thought, of the imperial idea.

  2 It was celebrated by W. S. Gilbert in The Bishop of Rum-ti-Foo:

  From east and south the holy clan

  Of bishops gathered, to a man:

  To Synod, called Pan-Anglican;

  In flocking crowds they came.

  1 His following, calling itself the Church of England in South Africa, survives to this day despite the opposition of the Cape Town hierarchy, and has its own Bishop.

  1 Rival god-kings did sometimes arise among the subject peoples, but they seldom maintained their challenge for long, the natives generally preferring the distant allure of the Great White Queen. The most endearing of the rebel divinities was Te Whero Potatau, who was hailed by the Maoris as a Messianic king, but who protested himself that he was only a snail.

  1 A moving example still extant is the Queen’s Colour of the 1st Battalion, 24th Regiment (South Wales Borderers) which hangs in Brecon Cathedral. Two officers were cut to pieces by Zulus trying to save this standard after the Battle of Isandhlwana in 1879. It was found after their deaths, embellished by the Queen with a wreath of silver immortelles, and carried by the battalion for another fifty-four years.

  1 And he lived in Malta.

  1 Though impious choristers had their own version of it—Lo, Startled Chefs/Assyrian Sodas Bring—just as younger Canadian churchgoers preferred to venerate the Twelve Opossums.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Humiliation of the Metis

  THE British were now exporting to their dominions a kind of package civilization, offered in competition with the local product, and backed by powerful service arrangements. Sometimes this was conscious policy: Sir George Grey, Lord Melbourne’s Under-Secretary for the Colonies, had long before recommended the deliberate destruction of tribal systems everywhere in the Empire, and their replacement by societies of agricultural small-holders. Sometimes it was a matter of economic strategy: Manchester, for example, had virtually demolished the Indian textile industry, the basis of Indian folk-craft
and a mainstay of traditional Indian life.1 More often, though, it was instinctive, or even incidental, and was seen by the British, if they saw it all, simply as an aspect of historical determinism.

  The indigenous cultures reacted variously to this assault. Some, like the Hindu and Muslim civilizations of India, yielded but did not break, treating the western culture as a transient phenomenon.2 Some, like the Burmese, simply took no notice. The aborigines of Australia faded away uncomprehending. The Irish fitfully but furiously resisted. And there was one culture at least which, while its followers understood very well how powerful was the imperial challenge, threw everything into a last spasm of resistance, determined to do or die in defence of its own ways. This was the back- wood culture of the Metis, into whose prairie fastness of Western Canada the power of the British Empire, in the later years of the 1860s, complacently and inexorably advanced.

  2

  We have already encountered these striking half-breeds, paddling Governor Simpson’s canoe flamboyantly to Norway House, or guiding the snowshoe traders of the Honourable Company through forest trails of Rupert’s Land. They remained, 20 years later, still a bold, free people, semi-nomadic—hunters, trappers, boatmen, guides, traders. They were a handsome and hospitable lot, with their rich strains of Indian, French and Scottish blood, and though they were given to heavy drinking and protracted roistering, most of them were devout Roman Catholics. In earlier years the Hudson’s Bay Company had generally approved of them. They made useful employees, they helped to keep unwanted settlers out, and they were valuable intermediaries with the full-blooded Indians. Most of the Metis were illiterate. They spoke a patois of their own, a mixture of antique French, Cree or Chippewa, English, and prairie terms of their own devising: and all their values, too, were mixed—half wild, half settled, half European, half Indian. They were a sensitive, proud, but troubled people, not quite sure where they stood in the world and its history.

  By the 1860s the greatest Metis concentration was in the region of what is now Manitoba, in the heart of the Great Plains. Their chief market centre was Pembina, across the frontier in the United States, but their true homeland was the Canadian country to the north, along the banks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, where some 6,000 of them still lived in a gaudy and heroic life-style. There they formed a relatively compact and recognizable community, hunting the dwindling buffalo herds in exciting horseback sweeps, and farming in the old French manner with strips of land running down to the river banks. They believed themselves to have inalienable rights in the country, to be its true masters if not actually its owners. They preserved a sense of brotherhood, and with their priests and their elected leaders, their bright clothes, their dashing songs and their long adventurous memories, were able to sustain an inbred and truculent culture not quite like any other.

  But it was in this very region, on the banks of the Red River, that the Hudson’s Bay Company had permitted the one permanent European settlement within their territories of the west. We have already seen how uncertain were the origins of this remote colony. At one time its survival had seemed unlikely, but it had persevered, put down roots, and eventually thrived. In the 1860s it was still theoretically governed by the Company, but had hardened into a self-reliant frontier community, each for himself and all for progress. By now about 2,000 Europeans lived in the Red River colony—mostly Scottish by origin still, but with admixtures of Englishmen and Americans. No less than the Metis, they were proud of their own accomplishments, and fiercely egalitarian. When Henry Hind, a well-known Cambridge geologist, called at one Red River farm in the course of a scientific journey, he was invited to sit down for lunch. The table was laid for one. ‘Where’s my plate?’ promptly demanded Mr Gowler, the master of the house. ‘Oh John,’ his wife cried, ‘you would not think of sitting at table with a gentleman?’ ‘Give me a chair and a plate!’ retorted the pioneer. ‘Am I not a gentleman too? Is not this my house, and these my victuals? Give me a plate!’

  Red River was the only sizeable settlement in central Canada. To the west of it the open prairie extended to the Rockies. To the east lay an appalling barrier of forest, quagmire, lake and rocky outcrop, smothering northern Ontario, and so impenetrable that the only really practicable route to Red River from Ottawa or Toronto lay south of the frontier, via Chicago and St Paul. The settlement was rough-and-ready, but not unattractive. Its nucleus was the Company post called Fort Garry, a fortified compound at the confluence of the two rivers. This was the centre of Red River life. Here the traders brought their pelts and their produce, the courts sat, the administration had its offices. The rooms were painted in garish reds, yellows and oranges, to break the monotony of the endless blues, whites and greens outside, and life around the fort, too, was always full of colour. In summer flotillas of canoes were drawn up on the river bank outside, and from the gate convoys of Red River carts, drawn by horses or oxen, set off into the prairie barked about by dogs—carts designed specifically for the prairie, whose high wooden wheels made, as they turned on their ungreased wooden axles, a high screeching noise, nerve-racking and distinctive, which became to most visitors the unforgettable theme of Red River. In winter horse-drawn sledges galloped in and out, their passengers swathed in furs and bright striped blankets, or long trains of dog-teams arrived over the snow from outlying settlements—St Andrew, Little Britain, or Old England. Indians and Metis crowded around the stores and the purchase offices, huddled hangdog outside the courtroom door, or plodded in with piles of skins or horned elk-heads on their shoulders.

  Around the fort was a little clutter of log houses, shops and warehouses. A handsome stern-wheeler puffed up and down the river, and along its banks, for ten or twenty miles, there extended the homesteads of the English-speaking farmers, with their stout granite houses, their churches and their gardens, comfortably above the water. An air of rural contentment hung about these country parts, tinged with nostalgia—there could hardly be a more homesick church than the Anglican church of St Andrew’s, peaceful beside the river, with its imported English trees doing well in the churchyard, its authentic English smells of church must and hassock (though the hassocks were made of buffalo hide), its notices of church functions pinned in the little stone porch, its cosy rectory muslin-curtained around the corner, and even the skylarks which, especially brought from the Old Country, often soared and sang in the cold empyrean.

  But through this analogue of the imperial order swirled and swaggered the Metis—improvident, merry, drunk, quick-witted, cherishing little love for the Company and its traditions, and no loyalty to the misty congeries of British colonies known as Canada. They mostly lived along the banks of the Assiniboine, and there they had their own Catholic basilica of St Boniface, with a bishop and a school. The Metis had repeatedly clashed with authority in the Red River, chiefly because of the Company’s trading policies. They were fierce free enterprisers, and they had many friends and relatives across the American frontier. In particular they looked for profit and pleasure to the thriving American city of St Paul, 400 miles to the south, where trade was free and liquor ran more freely than the Company ever allowed. The Metis of Red River were like running fire in a warm haystack, and they often exploded into violence. To the Anglo-Saxon settlers they were dangerous and volatile aliens, not to be trusted with guns, spirits or women: and the Metis, for their part, often egged on by French Canadians, by Americans, by Irishmen, and other inveterate enemies of the British Empire, viewed the settlers with implacable distrust.

  In 1867 the four most populous colonies of British North America, Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, confederated themselves into the Dominion of Canada, a self-governing possession of the Crown, under the leadership of Sir John Macdonald—‘Old Tomorrow’, as the Indians called him. Two years later the Hudson’s Bay Company surrendered to the new Government all its political and territorial rights, and the whole of the west became part of the confederation. All at once Canada became a nation, coast to coast, and the poli
ticians, the financiers, the engineers and the surveyors began planning a railroad which, by linking the Atlantic and the Pacific shores, would make the whole enormous territory an exploitable British whole, proof against the expansionist tendencies of the Americans to the south.

  The Metis were not forewarned of these developments. Nobody asked their opinions. They merely learnt, in 1869, that henceforth the Red River area would be governed by an altogether new authority, appointed from Ottawa and doubtless dedicated to the extension of British civilization throughout the spaces of the west.

  3

  The first suggestion of resistance to this change occurred in the autumn of 1869, shortly before the transfer of authority. The Canadians had already decided that the Red River settlement must be reinforced by good Anglo-Saxon stock from Ontario, to act as a base for the opening of the whole west, to keep out the Americans, and to balance the influence of the French Canadians and their Catholic missions. A military survey party was sent to Fort Garry to choose the best sites for new settlement, and was instructed to use the Ontario system of settlement survey—square blocks, that is, instead of the linear system of ‘river lots’ traditional throughout French-speaking Canada. The Metis were fiercely resentful. They well understood the implications of the survey. They knew that it meant the influx of large numbers of diligent Canadian farmers, to turn the whole prairie into a grain factory, and put an end to the buffalo hunting and the easy-going Metis life.