by Jan Morris
But then ‘an Empire without religion’, Victoria had also written, ‘is like a house built upon sand’. There was certainly no shortage of religion as such. Upon the passive mass of Hindus, Muslims, animists, fetishists, sun-worshippers and pagans, corps of Christians were at work. Some 360 different missionary bodies maintained nearly 12,000 Christian missionaries in the field—rather more than the imperial garrison of Malta. They claimed to have converted more than 10 million people to Christianity, and the Bishop of Stepney once declared that the Imperial spirit in the State called for an Imperial spirit in the Church. Everywhere in the Queen’s dominions the dynamism of Christianity had left its mark. Pugin’s spire at Queenstown sent the emigrants westward into the Atlantic, the towers of the Basilica of St John the Baptist, high above St John’s harbour, welcomed them to the New World. The church of St James, within the Kashmir Gate at Delhi, was erected at the sole expense of Colonel James Skinner, of Skinner’s Horse, ‘in fulfilment of a vow made while lying wounded on the field of battle … in testimony of his sincere faith in the truth of the Christian religion’1. Sometimes the Archbishops of Canterbury and York swept into the Privy Council chambers to act as assessors in some ecclesiastical appeal from the distant Empire, and any Sunday morning, in any princely State of India, the locals might see the English of the neighbourhood, in their Sunday calico and polished tongas, trotting into town for morning service in the Residency drawing-room—a compulsive routine, it must have seemed, which gave cohesion to their exiled lives, and bound them together in godly purpose. Elsewhere in the Empire congregations were often assembled in order of seniority—highest officials in the front pews, a couple of rows of natives at the very back. There was an opulent Anglican Bishop’s Palace in Calcutta, opposite the Cathedral, which must have suggested to the Bengalis immense spiritual resources far away: in Bulawayo the Bishop was taking services among the pioneers with makeshift fittings in the Empire Theatre, and was once seen to be announcing the next hymn, The Church’s One Foundation, standing on a Black and White whiskey crate.
Buried away among it all was a conviction, common among imperialists of diverse kinds, that a spiritual destiny had called the British to their pre-eminence—that they were a chosen people, divinely different, endowed with special gifts, but entrusted with special duties, too. Admiral Fisher thought, only half in jest, that they were the Lost Tribes. Henley thought their country was the ‘chosen daughter of the Lord’—
There’s the menace of the Word
In the Song on your bugles blown.
Kipling thought God had hidden the frontier territories of the Empire ‘till He judged His people ready’. Providence, Destiny, Judgement—all these were basic to the vocabulary of the New Imperialism: when the Queen went to her Jubilee service at St Paul’s the Daily Mail announced in a sacramental cross-head that the mother of the Empire had gone to do homage to the One Being
MORE MAJESTIC THAN SHE
—as if to imply that she was merely reporting the state of the imperial garrison to her superior officer. War, empire and religion were inextricably related in the public mind. It was a fighting God, an Old Testament, fire-eating God, who seemed to be presiding over the imperial progress—‘Lord of our far-flung battle-line’.
If it sometimes looked brash or arrogant, sometimes this Christian certainty was beautiful to encounter. The most magical building in the British Empire stood at a bush settlement called Blantyre, in what was later to be Nyasaland. There, in 1888, a missionary called David Clement Ruffelle Scott decided to build a church. There was at that time no European town of Blantyre at all. Scott was the leader of a Scottish Church mission which had settled there, beside the slave route to the lakes of the interior, as disciples of Livingstone, spreading the Word and educating the natives. He and his colleagues had hacked out a clearing, all among the dripping foliage, at the foot of the wooded valley which ran up to Zomba and the inner mysteries of Nyasa: and it was there that he decided to build his great church. He knew very little about architecture or construction, but he was genuinely inspired. He built in ecstasy. He made the bricks out of the clay of ant-hills, and he laid the foundations before he had drawn a plan. The building grew as he went along, its shape decreed by two unusual principles. First, it was to have no front, back or sides—each face was to be of equal importance. Secondly, it was to avoid symmetry wherever possible—‘Symmetry,’ Scott thought, ‘means poverty of ideas.’ While he worked at his building Scott was also compiling a monumental Encyclopaedic Dictionary of the Mang’anja Language, and the two great projects proceeded side by side, year by year, in that steamy and barbaric setting. By 1897 both were finished. The dictionary took its place among the standard works of African reference, and the church became one of the most moving in Christendom.
It was the strangest building. It was vaguely Byzantine, with African ornamentation—Zimbabwe Byzantine. It had a dome, and two towers, and flying buttresses, and innumerable odd projections, turrets, filletings and chisellings. Its bricks had never lost their sandy termite colour, and the church stood in a flat brown expanse of stringy grass, unmistakably a forest clearing still, and surrounded at a distance, like a king’s hut in its kraal, by the workshops and classrooms of the mission. On the Communion table stood a book-rest made from the tree under which Livingstone’s heart had been buried, upcountry in the Ilala territory. On a buttress of the south-west tower a brass plate commemorated the 365 lunar observations by which, in 1885, Lieutenant H. E. O’Neill of the Royal Engineers had determined the longitude of Blantyre:2 hours, 20 minutes, 13.56 seconds east of Greenwich.
3
Yet there was no rule to it. In heathen India there was an Established Anglican Church, supported by Indian revenue: in Christian New Zealand there was no official church at all. The Anglican Metropolitan of India came eighth in the Indian order of precedence, after the Chief Justice of Bengal, but the Archbishop of Sydney had no official place, and in some of the Queen’s colonies the Roman Catholic Church was given State aid. No religion was proscribed in the British Empire, and none demanded. At a time—until 1871—when it was theoretically impossible to enter Oxford University without subscribing to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Anglican faith, no religious affiliations were required of the men who ruled the Empire.
To the peoples at the receiving end, the faith of the Empire must have been exceedingly confusing. It was true, of course, that the kind sahib or bwana in the dog-collar was to be found everywhere, drinking gin with the officers in the big mess-tent or prostrate beneath the awning on the C.M.S. canoe: but he might represent any of a dozen different varieties of Christianity, he might be daggers drawn, theologically if not personally, with his brother-in-cloth down the river, he might honour his creed with gorgeous rituals of incense and cloth-of-gold, or self-abasing monologues. In Uganda there were actually religious wars, between tribes converted by Anglicans and tribes converted by Catholics. Perhaps a fifth of the Empire was Roman Catholic—there were 166 Catholic bishops, against 90 Anglican—and sometimes the Catholic cathedral in an imperial colony looked almost as official as the Anglican: in 1897 they had just completed the enormous new basilica of St Thomas at Mylapore outside Madras, the supposed burial-place of the martyred saint, and the site of a Catholic diocese since 1521. Jews and Masons were everywhere, too. The only synagogue in the world where the Sephardic and the Ashkenazic rites were jointly celebrated was in Kingston, Jamaica—in 1882 a great fire had destroyed the temples of both communities, so they polled funds to build one together. Even as they completed St Thomas’s basilica at Mylapore, they put the finishing touches to the Masonic Hall in Johannesburg opened that summer, too, and used by the Lodges of the Silver Thistle and Star of the Rand. (There was a synagogue in Johannesburg already, allegedly opened by President Kruger ‘in the name of Jesus Christ’, but the very first Jo’burg pastor was a Wesleyan, F. J. Briscoe, who took up residence in a wagon in Market Square in 1887.)
In the early days of British ru
le thousands of Ceylonese adopted the British faith because they thought it was a Government religion, compulsory for British subjects. They soon knew better. It took all sorts to make a British world, and what Raffles once called ‘the purest beams of reformed religion’ were not all-penetrating. Only the inspiration of individual Christians, and the evident material success of the faith, could really qualify Christianity as an ideology of the Pax Britannica. The gentlest of the imperialists hoped that the Christian example, if it did not actually convert the heathen, would at least stimulate their own religions towards a higher spirituality. Younghusband, for instance, thought that Hinduism had been cleansed by the Christian comparison, and said of the Queen’s Indian subjects: ‘We sought them merely for trade. We found them immersed in strife. If ever we leave them, may it be in that attitude most natural to them, with their arms stretched out to the Divine.’ Certainly some of the manners and motions of Christianity had their effect on other devotions. Semi-Christian sects of a thousand otiose varieties sprang up among the negroes of West Africa and the West Indies, fetish curiously mingled with catechism, Obeah with apostolic succession. On a temple bell at Moulmein in Burma a bell-founder who was surely of Evangelical education had scratched his own fundamentalist warning upon a Buddhist temple bell:
He who destroyed this Bell
They must be in the great Hel
And unable to coming out.
4
A less involved imperial principle was the mystique of the Crown. To this genial madness there was much method. The Crown was not only a focus of loyalty to all the white colonies. To millions of coloured subjects it was the one token of British supremacy that seemed familiar—the one link with their own lost cultures of totem, mystery and chieftaincy. The Crown was still surrounded by trappings of divine right, trumpets and orbs, rubies and sapphires. It expressed itself in gorgeous symbols, vast palaces, flags and armies: the throne of Tipu Sultan stood in the Viceroy’s palace at Calcutta precisely as though it had been taken in a fight between champions, Queen and Sultan cap-à-pie. Towering patricians in Government Houses professed themselves to be no more than the Crown’s servants, and above every bench of authority its symbol stood, powerful as a withered monkey’s claw in the hut of a magic-man. Upon the head especially of an aged and formidable female sovereign, the Crown was a potent item of joss.
The British skilfully exploited it. Whoever coined the phrase the Great White Queen knew what he was about. The most passionate subversives of Empire, the Irish themselves, retained a sneaking affection for the Queen, imperfectly expressed by Patrick Doyle, a sailor, who was found insensible on the Dublin quays on Jubilee eve, and explained that he had been singing God Save the Queen when a Russian sailor assaulted him. To people like the Indians the existence of an Empress, however far away and alien, satisfied inherited tastes for strong personal rulers, like the Moguls and Mahrattas of old. Most middle-class Ceylon households had their big lithographs of Victoria, enbosomed with medals and surrounded by crowns and mottoes in Oxford frames: in Bombay many people thought the plague of that summer had occurred because the civic statue of the Great White Queen had recently been defaced.
Victoria was able to play upon sensitive chords of pride when she dealt with lesser rulers as one prince to another. The King of Tonga was so delighted by signs of imperial condescension that he adopted the name George, after George III, and named his wife Salote, a Polynesian attempt at Charlotte.1 In 1890 four envoys from the Queen arrived at the kraal of King Lobengula, to tell him that Her Britannic Majesty had granted a charter to the British South Africa Company, entitling it in effect to disinherit him (and in the event to kill him, too). Her envoys were wisely chosen. They were four officers of the Royal Horse Guards, and they clanked into the royal compound dressed in full dress uniform, steel breastplates, high gleaming boots and helmet-plumes drooping low over their eyes. Lobengula was delighted with them, and his warriors queued to see their own faces reflected in the officers’ breastplates.1 The peoples of the Indian States made their salaams to the Queen-Empress by way of their own Maharajahs, lesser inhabitants of the same mysterious plane: when Victoria was proclaimed Queen-Empress at a colossal Delhi durbar, in 1858, thousands of princely feudatories had swarmed to the ancient capital to share the royal unction.
The British missed no opportunity to demonstrate the wealth and grandeur of the Imperial Crown. Royal princes went on splendid tours, royal dukes commanded armies on distant stations. The Queen’s satraps carried themselves with airs of consequence far more impressive than any mere ambassador’s. They lived and moved like royalty themselves, distributing royal honours from time to time, and behaving very loftily indeed. A rich and self-respecting American woman, at a Viceregal soirée during a visit to Calcutta, was approached by an aide-de-camp with the news that His Excellency would now be graciously pleased to meet her, if she would kindly come to the ante-room. ‘In my country,’ she retorted, ‘gentlemen generally have the good manners to come to the ladies’—and leaving the palace in a huff at once feminist and republican, she boarded her yacht and sailed away. In the colonnade of the church of St John at Calcutta there stood the tomb of Lady Canning, widow of the first Viceroy, who had died of jungle fever in 1861. It was a huge stone sarcophagus covered in crests, big enough to contain a lady of gigantic stature, and it looked like the tomb of the first of a dynasty—as though the British, remembering the thrilling royal chapels of imperial Spain, intended to honour the Viceroys and their ladies in the grand manner of Isabel and Ferdinand.
The ceremonial of monarchy, skilfully translated to the distant provinces, reinforced the imperial hold. Three knightly Orders sustained the Raj in India—the Most Exalted Order of the Star of India, the Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire, and for ladies the Imperial Order of the Crown of India. The Colonial Office had its own Order, of St Michael and St George, whose Chancellor’s office was along the corridor from the Colonial Secretary’s, whose motto was Auspicium Melioris Aevi—A Pledge of Better Times—and whose Prelate was the Archbishop of Rupert’s Land. All were attended with much glitter: the emblem of the Grand Cross of the Star of India was a cameo of Victoria surrounded by diamonds, with a star of diamonds above and the motto ‘Heaven’s Light Our Guide’. Loyal bigwigs were made more loyal still by the shrewd distribution of such honours (though the King of Siam turned up his nose at the Star of India, which was, he thought, only suitable for feudatories—‘Better give him nothing at all, then’, was Salisbury’s unperturbed response). Native dignitaries from Hong Kong to the Gold Coast became knights of English orders, queerly uniting in their persons the legacies of gonfalon and seneschal with heritages of tribal stool or ancestral carapace. In Ceylon a headman called Solomon Bandaranaike, presented with a ceremonial sword by the young Prince Albert in 1882, was officially allowed to adopt the name Bandaranaike Rajakumara-Kadukeralu—‘the Bandaranaike who was invested with a Sword by a Royal Prince’.1 The imperialists themselves measured their careers from honours list to honours list, gradually ascending the scale of royal commendation, and taking it all very seriously. One of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee messages came from the Prince of Wales, who told his mother: ‘I cannot describe how touched I am by your great kindness in appointing me on the occasion of your Jubilee Grand Master of your great and distinguished Order of the Bath.’
The mystique of royalty was easily stretched into a mystique of imperialism. (A shrewd Basuto once asked Lord Bryce if Queen Victoria actually existed, or if she was purely a figment of British imagination.) On great occasions a rapt elevation seemed to hold the whole organization in thrall, hushing even the agitators, and endowing the Empire, for its simpler subjects, with a supernatural immunity. It was the existence of a Supreme Person that did this, giving the Raj a character at once human and all-knowing—an Indian expression for it was mabap sirkar, ‘mother and father Government’. Queen and Empire became ecstatically fused. The Empress Victoria’s Golden Jubilee Anthem, a stirring Burmese march, lon
g outlasted the Jubilee itself, and was played (on clarions, bamboo clappers, drums and silk-string harps) whenever the Chief Commissioner visited a town. When One Arrow, a colleague of Louis Riel, was charged with ‘levying war against Her Majesty’s Crown and dignity’, it was translated for his benefit as ‘kicking off Victoria’s bonnet and calling her bad names’. In India Bryce heard the story of a tiger which had escaped from the Lahore Zoo for several days, defying all efforts to recapture it. At last its keeper, approaching as close as he dare, abjured the beast to return to its cage ‘in the name of the British Government’—and it did.
5
Plain Englishness, in those days, was a principle. The British Empire was most decidedly British. This was not mere patriotism, saluting the flag at sundown, sticking up for the Mother Country, or humming Rule Britannia, as Lord Rosebery habitually did when his spirits flagged. It too was a kind of religion—which, like Islam, pervaded every human activity, and helped to regulate every function. Quite apart from the laws, the traditions and the facts of authority, there were specifically British ways of doing things. There were emotions no proper Englishman would display. There were tastes and taboos so pungently British that the whole world knew them, and expected them to be honoured. The Times, the club, leaving the gentlemen to their cigars, the stiff upper lip, hunting halloos at midnight by tight young subalterns on guest nights, bacon and eggs, walking around the deck a hundred times each morning, cricket, Abide With Me—all these were imperial emblems, symptoms of Britishness, parodied and envied everywhere.
