Pax Britannica

by Jan Morris

  Grandest of all was the Viceroy of India, Victoria’s shadow in the greatest of her dominions. The title was little more than an honorific, the power of the office arising from the subsidiary rank of Governor-General: but it had an imperial ring to it, and was borne by only one other dignitary of Empire—the Queen’s man in Ireland. There had been ten Viceroys of India since the Crown took over from the East India Company in 1858. The tenth was Victor Alexander Bruce, 9th Earl of Elgin and 13th of Kincardine, the son of another Viceroy of India (who was buried in India), and the grandson of Lord Durham, author of a celebrated report on the Canadian Constitution. Elgin was educated at Eton and Balliol, under the famous Dr Jowett, and had married a daughter of the Earl of South-esk. In 1893 this tremendous swell had reluctantly accepted the Viceroyalty. He thought himself incompetent for the job, and, wrote Sir Frank Brown in the Dictionary of National Biography‚ ‘his recognition of his own limitations was so far justified that he cannot be reckoned among the outstanding governors-general of India’.

  At least he assumed his dignities as to the manner born. To anyone with a background less gorgeous than that of a British aristocrat at this opulent moment of British history, the Viceregal circumstances might have seemed daunting indeed. In Calcutta the Viceroy lived in a palace fit for any king.1 Huge lions surmounted its gates and sphinxes couchant guarded its doors, together with cannon on pale blue carriages, and one borne on the wings of a dragon. Brilliant Indian lancers clattered through the courtyards, thirteen aides-de-camp deferentially awaited instructions, servants in liveries of gold and crimson padded down vast corridors beneath the trophies, treasures and monumental portraits assembled during the three centuries of the British presence. In the marble-floored dining-room six busts of Caesars, taken from a captured French ship, reminded Lord Elgin of his imperial status, even over the soup.

  A portrait of the Viceroy’s own father, the 8th Earl, hung in the Council Room, along a wall from Clive and Warren Hastings, and there were portraits, too, of Louis XIV, an eighteenth-century Shah of Persia, an Amir of Kabul and several English kings and queens. The ballroom was upstairs, with a vast chandelier originally intended as a present from the King of France to the Nizam of Hyderabad, and artlessly displayed upon an anteroom table were a sheaf of ancient treaties—with Hyderabad, with Mysore, with Seringapatam, agreements which had first consolidated the British Raj in India, and thus laid the foundations for all this splendour.

  From this house the Viceroy moved magnificently through India, resplendent with all the colour and dash of the vast Empire at his feet, with his superb bodyguard jangling scarlet beside his carriage, silken Indian princes bowing at his carpet, generals quivering at the salute and ceremonial salutes of thirty-one guns—independent Asian sovereigns were only entitled to twenty-one, and even the Queen-Empress herself only got 101. He had a pleasant country house at Barrackpur, twenty miles up the Hooghly River, with moorings for the Viceregal yacht: and when the summer came, and the heat of the Indian plains became incompatible with the imperial dignity, up he went with his army of attendants to the hill station of Simla. There on a hill-top his summer palace awaited him, scrubbed and gleaming for the season, its major-domos, secretaries, chefs and myriad maidservants immaculate and expectant in their several departments—a sprawling chalet set in a delicious garden, where a Vicereine might stroll in the mountain evening spaciously, as a great chatelaine should, and the pines, streams and crispness reminded visitors that these were rulers from the distant north, sent by royal command to govern with such grandeur the sweltering territories of Asia.

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  The Crown at the very summit, with the Queen-Empress to sign the imperial decrees, and such superb courtiers stationed across the Empire: below it something very different, Parliament. The British Parliament in Westminster stood as trustee of the Pax. The supreme source of imperial policy was the elected assembly of the British people, which had nothing celestial to it at all, wavered inconsistently from view to view, was quite likely to reverse its entire imperial attitude from one general election to another, and had been until recently notoriously uninterested in imperial affairs anyway. This was the legislative authority of Empire, and its executive heads, under the Queen and the Prime Minister, were the Secretaries of State for India and the Colonies, politicians appointed to those offices as stages in a public career.

  Parliament had traditionally left the running of the Empire to the executive, and in imperial matters generally did what the Government asked. Ireland, the one exception, had been a running passion of parliamentarians throughout the century, but India seldom aroused a debate. ‘The real trouble is’, as the Duke of Wellington had remarked long before, ‘that the public cannot be brought to attend to an Indian subject.’ In the nineties there was rather more interest at Westminster, thanks to the popularity of the New Imperialism, and several active lobbies kept the issues of Empire in Hansard’s columns, even between imperial crises. The philanthropic lobby nagged the conscience of M.P.s with questions about the mistreatment of Kaffirs, or the Indian opium monopoly, or slave-running in the Persian Gulf. The financial lobby urged the interests of the chartered companies, the military activists pressed for a Forward Policy on the Afghan frontier, retired colonial administrators fought against suggestions of weakness or withdrawal. Sometimes parliamentarians actually went out to the colonies to see for themselves, and to earn the contempt of those who, like Kipling, despised the instant expert.

  For the run-of-the-mill politician, however, at more run-of-the-mill moments, the issues of Empire were mostly glamorous irrelevances, whose effect on domestic politics was normally peripheral, and whose meaning in terms of votes had never been thoroughly examined. It was a paradox of history that so tremendous an Empire lay at the disposal of such fluctuating wills and interests: for Parliament could pass laws binding in every single imperial possession, even the self-governing colonies, and colonial laws were void if they clashed with Westminster’s Acts. It was not called an Imperial Parliament for nothing (though in fact the title was only adopted when, in 1800, the Dublin Parliament was abolished, and Westminster assumed its duties too).

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  From the graceful little iron suspension bridge that spanned the lake in St James’s Park one of the most celebrated views in London could be obtained. It was a delectably frivolous spot in the very centre of the capital, and had been for centuries a favourite place of dalliance and promenade. A Venetian smell of water and damp earth hung about the bridge, and the skyline was brushed with ornamental trees. Geese strutted magnificently across the lawns; the famous park pelicans flapped their great wings upon their rock. Beyond the wooded island at the east end of the lake sat a rustic lodge, the home of the park-keeper, and towering above it rose the halls of Authority: to the right, through the trees, Big Ben and the towers of Westminster Abbey, to the left the exotic cupolas of the Horse Guards, and in the centre, ponderous and elaborate, the offices of Empire, with a square tower and a plethora of flagstaffs.1

  Below Parliament, and subject to its Secretaries of State, two professional departments presided over the British Empire. They were both housed in George Gilbert Scott’s Italianate Government offices in Whitehall, south of Downing Street, east of St James’s Park. The building had been the subject of a famous architectural controversy of the fifties—Scott wanted to build it in the Gothic style, but Gothic had come to be identified with Toryism, and when the Whigs returned to power in 1857 Lord Palmerston insisted on Renaissance. The structure stood there now in tremendous mediocrity, vast but uncompelling. The Colonial Office, in the north-west corner of the block, was decorated with symbolic figures of Empire, together with portrait medallions of nine former Colonial Secretaries: the India Office had a tower overlooking the park, and was embellished with Governors-General, emblems of Indian rivers and cities, Indian racial types and loyal feudatories. The Colonial Office, furnished in dark mahogany and deep leather, with smoky coal fires and high narrow corridors, possesse
d a fireplace, taken from the waiting-room of its old premises in Whitehall, before which Nelson and Wellington had warmed themselves during their only meeting, shortly before Trafalgar. The India Office contained fine collections of imperial statuary, clocks, old furniture and pictures, inherited from the East India Company and now disposed about its immense staircases, its library and its majolica-ornamented covered courtyard. Each department was run by a Permanent Under-Secretary from the Home Civil Service, but each had its own pronounced character and body of tradition. There had never been a single imperial administration, just as there was never a Minister of Empire.

  The Colonial Office was established in 1854: until then the colonies were thrown in with the armed forces under the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. It was organized in five territorial departments: the West Indian; the North American and Australian, to which Cyprus and Gibraltar were attached; the West African, which also handled Malta; the South African; the Asian. India was outside the office’s concern, and several protectorates of the Empire were administered by the Foreign Office (elsewhere in the same building). It was a very small establishment to govern such a domain: like a comfortable and unpretentious club. Many of its senior members were bachelors. They all knew each other well, nobody called anybody ‘sir’, one entered a colleague’s room without appointment, without even knocking on the door. There were only twenty-three first-class clerks, as its senior functionaries were called, and to administer the Empire in detail they would have required an encyclopedic familiarity with matters ranging from tropical crop-rotation to the circumcision of females. Fortunately they normally left the colonies to run themselves. Most colonial governors were professionals, many of them former first-class clerks themselves, and if things went reasonably smoothly in St Lucia, Fiji or Ceylon it was the prudent practice of the Colonial Office to leave well alone.

  Since the days of Sir James Stephen, Colonial Under-Secretary from 1836 to 1847, the bias of the Office had generally been towards a liberal generosity. Stephen (‘Mr Mother Country’, ‘Mr Over-Secretary’) had been a leading figure of the anti-slavery movement—one of the only two Sabbaths he ever deliberately broke was spent in drawing up the Abolition Bill of 1833—and since its inception the Colonial Office had, in an often timid but generally consistent way, regarded itself as a trustee for the underdogs of Empire. It was often blamed for sickly weakness by the more hell-for-leather class of colonist, and there were settlers from Jamaica to Bulawayo to whom its very name spelt a betrayal of white interests, of imperial interests, in the name of fuddy-duddy philanthropy. If ever an African tribal leader felt impelled to appeal over the heads of the local British authorities to the distant metropolitan power, it was the Colonial Office to which, buying himself a frock-coat and a top-hat, and packing the insignia of his decorations, he trustfully made his way. The Colonial Office was also, in a way, the London embassy of the colonies. Under its wing were the Crown Agents for the Colonies, who represented the dependent possessions, and the Agents-General of the self-governing colonies. The Colonial Office was the Empire’s link with Westminster, and all the official cables from Ottawa, Perth, Colombo, Durban or Wellington were handled by its clerks, or its new corps of ‘lady type-writers’.

  The India Office was altogether grander and more stately. It, too, was really an agency: India was ruled from Calcutta, and its practical executive was the Viceroy. But the India Office, his link with the Imperial Government, was an alter ego of the Raj. All the departments of Indian Government had their microcosms there in Whitehall, and the Office had its own stores depot, audit office and accountant-general. The Colonial Office was less than half a century old: the roots of the India Office lay deep in the romantic past of the East India Company, with its London headquarters at India House in Leadenhall Street. The Office was financed out of Indian revenues, and its officials were advised by a body called the Council of India, consisting of retired generals and administrators with Indian experience. Its authority was concentrated: Lord Bryce once wrote that the whole course of legal reform in India in the nineteenth century, a profound and historic codification, had been arranged by two or three officials in Whitehall and two or three more in Calcutta.

  Everything about the India Office reflected Britain’s ancient association with the East. From the walls gazed down the faces of eighteenth-century administrators, heroes of the Mutiny, generals and pro-consuls: at the street door stood the ex-Army commissionaires, Indian campaign ribbons on their chests, ready to greet visitors in the rough-and-ready Hindustani familiar to generations of British soldiers. In the library a succession of eminent Sanskrit and Arabic scholars had guarded the great collections of Indian literature—priceless Tibetan and Burmese manuscripts, a Sanskrit series that was probably the finest in the world, a modern deposit library that had a statutory right to every book published in India, in any language. The India Office was not a clubbable society. It was old, sombre, powerful and legalistic. It moved at a grand despotic pace. With its splendid library, its immense accumulated experience, its constant flow of dispatches, its innumerable visitors from the East, it perhaps knew more about India than any office of government, anywhere, had ever known about another country.

  These were the two metropolitan departments of State which, from their gloomy but grandiose headquarters beyond the park, sent out their young men to rule the Empire.

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  It was an imperial maxim that the administrators of Empire should be chosen by the authorities in London, not by their seniors in the field. The intention was to avoid jobbery: one of the results was that both the India Office and the Colonial Office recruited their men overwhelmingly from the same stratum of society—the upper middle classes, stamped to a pattern by the public schools and the ancient universities. There was, though, no single method of entry to the imperial services. The two departments selected their people in very different ways.

  The Indian system was developed from the methods of the old East India Company. It was designed to raise a dedicated caste of professional administrators, intellectual, well paid, far above petty parochial controversies, and apparently as permanent and invulnerable as the sun itself. The purpose had a classical purity, and the selection was by a fairly stiff academic examination. Suppose a young man with a recommendation from his headmaster, and a good word from his tutor at Oxford, decided one day to have a shot at the Indian Civil—in those days one of the plum prizes of undergraduate ambition. Up he would go to London, if he were not under 21 nor over 23, and he would sit down to an examination in which he was offered twenty-one different papers, any one of which he could try if he liked, but none of which was compulsory. They ranged from Sanskrit to Logic and Mental Philosophy, and were of different value: advanced mathematics could earn a maximum of 900 marks, but Roman History was worth only 400. Seven papers were offered under the heading Natural Science, and there were papers in Arabic, French, German and Political Science. The set books for English Literature had been announced the year before: in 1897 they were two Shakespeare plays, two Ben Jonson plays, Paradise Lost, the poems of Marvell, Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, Bacon’s essays and Browne’s Religio Medici. In addition a candidate who took this paper was expected to have a ‘general acquaintance’ with twenty-five standard British authors, Chaucer to Macaulay.

  All this invited ‘cramming’, and many private tutors specialized in bringing a young man up to the mark for the Indian Civil. If, against heavy odds, he succeeded, he then spent a year’s probation at an English or Scottish university, and a second examination followed. This time he must take compulsory papers in Indian penal code and procedures, the principal language of one of the Indian areas, and the Indian Evidence and Contract Acts: he must take a paper in either the code of civil procedure or Hindu and Mohammedan Law, plus a choice of papers in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Chinese and the history of British India. He was also tested in horsemanship, including ‘the ability to perform journeys on horseback’: if he failed
this, he could go to India anyway, but he would get no rise in salary until he passed his equestrian tests out there, generally under the effectively ferocious eye of a cavalry riding-master.

  The Colonial Office was much less thorough, and looked for men of a different character. Civil Servants for Malaya, Hong Kong and Ceylon took the same examinations as those for India, but jobs in Africa and the lesser tropical colonies went by a kind of patronage. The private interview was the chosen method, and a quiet word in the right quarter often helped. Men were picked for a particular appointment, and they were likely to stay in the same colony all their lives, unless they reached the highest ranks (governors were moved every five years). There was no training programme—men were expected to learn their trade on the spot: many subtleties of native life and custom escaped this slapdash novitiate, and British colonial officers were frequently ignorant about complexities like customary law and land tenure. As a whole the Crown Colonies were ruled by willing all-rounders of very varied quality—what ambitious man, in the days before malaria control, would wish to devote a career to Sierra Leone? They were recruited more for character than brain-power: it was said that a candidate with a first-class degree would actually be regarded as suspect. The Colonial Office had woven a mesh of contacts with university tutors and headmasters, and found its men quietly and privately on what the British would later call ‘the old boy net’. ‘Our methods were mole-like’, wrote one Colonial Office official in retrospect. ‘We learnt to eschew publicity and to rely on personal contacts in the most fruitful quarters: quiet, persistent and indirect.’